Neither colonial nor historic: workers' organization at Rosyth dockyard, 1945-95

As Britain's youngest and Scotland's only naval dockyard, Rosyth's development differed from the historic English yards in significant ways. An adequate understanding of this turnaround rests in having a sense of continuities and discontinuities of the deep-seated bureaucratization of workers' organization at Rosyth. The policy process is viewed as rational, neutral and open to specific, defensive campaigns at moments of perceived danger to the interests of dockyard workers. Microstate life gave colonial structures on the island, particularly the dockyard, an all-pervasive presence over the economy, politics and even residential areas and language. As a way of showing the specificity of dockyard organizational capacities, a contrast will be drawn next between the home-based historic dockyards and the overseas colonial ones. Social scale, politics, employment relations and ideology are important for organizational capacities: whether dockyard workers are in the realm of Lilliput or at the metropolitan heart of Empire matters.