From New England to Australia, from Cape Horn and the islands of Antarctica to the Indian Ocean, from Japan to the California coast - wherever North American ships have sought seals for their fat or their skins, this comprehensive history follows. Beginning with the opening of American trade with China and ending with the modern-day controversy surrounding the Newfoundland seal hunt, The War against the Seals details the consequences of an industry’s killing of more than 50,000,000 seals in 150 years.
The consequences - financial, diplomatic, cultural, and ecological - have been enormous. Financially, sealing was of vital importance for such port cities as New London, Connecticut, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Victoria, British Columbia; the pelts of seals enriched merchants in the trade centers of Boston and San Francisco. Sealing played a role in the history of several South American nations, and in the evolution of Australia and New Zealand. In the late nineteenth century, an international dispute arose over sealing and other rights in the Bering Sea; before it was settled it involved the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, and Russia.
Culturally, the impact of the sealing industry was most obvious on the Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands, who were forcibly settled there by the Russians specifically to exploit the seals. And for the outporters of Newfoundland, and for other sealers, success or failure in the hunt often determined their economic survival.

The sealing industry has jeopardized the existence of several species of seal, and may well have resulted in the extinction of some. Busch deals with all the many species of seals, walruses, and sea otters that have been hunted; but he gives special attention to the fur seals of the Bering Sea and the harp seals of the Newfoundland hunt. He balances the harm that has been done with the economic advantages to the communities from which sealing ships have set forth.