The middle of the twentieth century marked the peak of the second great slaughter of the world’s sperm whales. While whalers desired their spermacetti and blubber, which could be rendered into different grades of oil for machinery lubrication, space flight, and soap, they never developed a commercial market for sperm whale teeth. Instead, teeth remained within the system of exchange aboard whaling fleets, traded for bottles of schnapps, cigarettes, and souvenirs amongst crew members. The teeth, however, also mattered to the sperm whale, who used them for self-defense, for luring prey, and even recording their own life history. Beginning with the tooth, this talk asks what it would look like to write the history of industrial whaling from the perspective of a whale? How can studies of sperm whale social structures, migrations, language, and environment, combined with artifacts and primary sources of industrial whaling, produce a new kind of social history for the non-human world?

Thomas Fleischman is an associate professor of German and environmental history at the University of Rochester. He is the author Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall, published in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series at the University of Washington Press. He is currently knee-deep in the research and writing of his next book, tentatively titled The Whaling Olympics: Aristotle Onassis and the Destruction and Survival of the World’s Last Great Whales.