ABSTRACT

Shipbuilding was an industry whose international rather than domestic orientation made it difficult to devise a policy framework that offered shelter. But although in that regard there were parallels with cotton, in other important respects the debate on shipbuilding reorganization took a rather different turn. For a start shipbuilding employers were quite ready to take collective action to tackle problems like surplus capacity and price-cutting without any prompting from the government. Capacity reduction per se offered only limited benefits because British shipbuilding methods were more labour than capital intensive. In terms of industrial reorganization, the slump did not mark a significant watershed for shipbuilding. Moreover, shipbuilding's internal problems were not really amenable to outside intervention. Thus for most of the interwar period the only rationale for government action was to mitigate the worst effects of the depressed and highly volatile trading environment in which the industry operated.