Building Ships, Building a Nation

".A pioneering work on contemporary Korean history, Building Ships, Building a Nation will occupy a central place in the emerging literature of the post-war period.... Nam gives voice and agency to a segment of society and a period of time that were relegated to silence for many years, and in the process profoundly alters our understanding of South Korean state and society." * Asian Studies Association, in awarding the 2011 James B. Palais Book Prize * "Overall, the account is a reminder that economics that fail to capture cultural and historical, and even emotional, context is rather senseless.His comments on labour in Korea bring to life the decades of labour-capital tensions that were, and still are, the backdrop for Korea's economic miracle." * International Journal of Maritime History * "Apart from presenting a case study of a union and its members with microhistorical depth, Building Ships, Building a Nation fills a lacuna of knowledge on workers in the twentieth century, serving as an indispensable contribution to scholarship on labor relations in contemporary Korea and East Asia." * Journal of Asian Studies * "This wonderful book restores a buried history of union activism in the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC) . . . and situates it in the larger context of militant and democratic labor movements in Korean society since the colonial period. . . . It is a welcome addition to the body of critical studies on modern and contemporary Korea that convey nuanced analyses of Korea's social history." * American Historical Review * "Focuses on the mostly male heavy industry workers at the shipyard and on historical and sociopolitical sources of their militancy." * Journal of Economic Literature *

Hwasook Nam is assistant professor of history and international studies at the University of Washington, where she holds the James B. Palais professorship in Korea studies.

Acknowledgments Introduction Part One | The Legacies of Colonialism and the Early Cold War Years 1. Worker Militancy in the Postwar Years 2. Anticommunism, Labor Rights, and Organized Labor: The Early 1950s Part Two | The Emergence of a Democratic Union 3 KSEC Workers in the 1950s 4 The KSEC Union in the Political Upheavals of 1960-61 5 Consolidation of a Democratic Union 6 Rationalization and Resistance Part Three | Development Over Democracy 7. Development versus Democracy: The Late 1960s 8. Privatization and the Suppression of Labor, 1968-69 9. Shipbuilding Workers under Authoritarian Rule: The 1970s 10. Shipbuilding for the World Market and Resurging Labor Militancy Appendix A: The KSEC Union Archive Document File List, 1960-79 Appendix B: The Labor Charter of 1948 Appendix C: A Comparison of Two Contracts, 1968 and 1971 Notes Bibliography Index