Apex Predators: A Global Environmental History of Human Interactions with Sharks

• Applicant: Professor Miles Alexander Powell, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556660184

Around the world, experts warn that shark populations are collapsing, with disastrous consequences for marine ecosystems and fisheries. The popular press and a significant body of scholarship identify the global shark fin trade, which has exploded in intensity since the 1980s, as driving this decline. But how accurate is this claim? Producing the first scholarly monograph addressing the environmental history of human-shark interactions, this project will provide a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the current crisis facing these creatures. Tentatively titled Apex Predators: A Global Environmental History of Human Interactions with Sharks, this work will examine the environmental, cultural, and economic history of human encounters with sharks since 1900. Complementing the research of marine scientists and ecologists, who have highlighted the biological susceptibility of sharks to overfishing, this study will explore how shifting human technologies and dietary preferences and enduring commercial structures have driven the worldwide decline of shark populations, threatening local extinctions in some instances, and producing cascading trophic collapses. In the process of documenting this ecological story, it will also uncover the material and social consequences of changes in popular perceptions of sharks from "mindless killing machines" to integral components of ecosystems. This transition will offer insights into broader shifts in international attitudes towards oceans, nature, and predators. This project will test a central hypothesis that I developed while completing preliminary archival research on five continents. When it comes to human-shark interactions, popular opinion holds that global shark populations have plummeted since the 1980s as a consequence of increasing purchasing power in China and that nation’s preference for shark fin soup. While there is some truth to this interpretation, it is incomplete and overly simplistic. I believe that this focus on the cultural practice of shark fin soup obscures much more profound structural issues that presently threaten global shark populations with annihilation. Most saliently, individuals within industrial societies have aspired to convert sharks into commodities for as long as the equipment to harvest them in large numbers has existed. Hence, I posit, the trouble is not so much the cultural practice of shark fin soup, but rather a broader, commerce-driven relationship to the seas that frantically endeavors to commodify every organism within them, even if the long-term corollary of such actions is inevitable systemic collapse.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants