Ships for the Seven Seas

Between the Civil War and World War I, Philadelphia emerged as the vital centre of American shipbuilding. This work explores this complex industry, from the workshop level to subcontracting networks spanning the Delaware valley. It describes entrepreneurial strategies and industrial change that facilitated the rise of the major shipbuilding firms; how naval architecture, marine engineering, and craft skills evolved as iron and steel took over wood as the basic construction material; and how changes in domestic and international trade and the rise of the American steel navy helped generate vessel contracts for local builders. The book also examines the military-industrial complex in the context of naval contracting. Contributing to the current debates in business history, this text explains how proprietary ownership and batch production strategies enabled late 19th-century builders to supply volatile markets with custom-built ships.But large-scale naval construction in the 1920s eroded production flexibility, the author argues, and since then, ill-conceived merchant marine policies and naval contracting procedures have brought about a structural crisis in American shipbuilding and the demise of the venerable Philadephia shipyards.