The Cod Fisheries, originally published in 1938 and revised and reissued in 1954, presented a new interpretation of European and North American history that has since become a classic. With that rare skill he possessed of weaving together the various strands of a complex and difficult historical situation, Innis showed how the exploitation of the cod fisheries from the fifteenth century to the twentieth has been closely tied up with the whole economic and political development of Western Europe and North America.

The relationship of the fisheries to the maritime greatness of Britain and to the growth of New England as an important commercial power is particularly stressed; and in the examination of the conflicts growing up about this industry are revealed the forces underlying the struggle between Britain and France for control of the new world, and the forces which led to the collapse of thye British Empire in America and the rise of an independent new world political power. The political struggles with Nova Scotia and the long conflict with the United States, continuing far into the nineteenth century, are examined in careful detail.