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The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870–1914
Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson
Harvard University Press, 1979

The performance of the British economy in the critical decades before 1914 is the subject of much scholarly debate. This first modern history of the British shipbuilding industry between 1870 and 1914 examines activities and attitudes of the shipbuilders in the context of this controversy over the quality of British entrepreneurship.

The authors consider the effectiveness of marketing practices, the rate of technological change, the degree to which ever-scarcer natural resources impose a constraint on growth, the general economic rationality of entrepreneurs, and, above all, the consequences of management decisions. After carefully weighing all evidence, the authors conclude that the general level of managerial performance was high, and in contrast to other sectors of heavy industry, British shipbuilders were able to maintain their dominant position.

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front cover of Wartime Shipyard
Wartime Shipyard
A STUDY IN SOCIAL DISUNITY
Katherine Archibald
University of Illinois Press, 2006

An eye-opening first-hand account of life in a WWII shipyard from a woman's perspective 

In 1942, Katherine Archibald, a graduate student at Berkeley, left the halls of academe to spend two years working in a nearby Oakland shipyard. She arrived with a host of preconceptions about the American working class, race relations and the prospect for their improvement, and wartime unity. Her experience working in a shipyard where women were seen as intruders, where "Okies" and black migrants from the South were regarded with barely-disguised hatred, and where trade unions preferred protecting their turf to defending workers' rights, threw much of her liberal faith into doubt.  

Archibald's 1947 book about her experiences, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, remains a classic account of life and labor on the home front. This new edition includes an introduction written by historians Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, who explore Archibald's work in light of recent scholarship on women and African Americans in the wartime workplace. 

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