Coming Tomorrow: A New Four-Part Series

 

A few weeks ago I wrapped up a quartet on how the world’s shipbuilding crown passed from one nation to another after World War II. Readers wrote in asking for something similar—an inside look at how a single industry evolves when the headlines go quiet. I’ve spent the last month digging through archives and interview transcripts, and tomorrow I’ll begin a new four-part series on soybeans.

Don’t yawn. Soy looks dull only until you notice that every cargo of beans is also a cargo of leverage: food security, trade wars, genetically-modified seed patents, dollar diplomacy, and the contest for who sets the global rules on climate and labor. In other words, the fights are every bit as fierce as the ones that once sent riveters swarming over steel hulls in Glasgow, Nagasaki, or Ulsan.

Below are the four shipbuilding pieces that started the conversation. Each one stands alone, but read in order they tell one continuous story of industrial rise, fall, and revenge.

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1. The Empire That Out-built Itself
   How the United States exploded from zero to the world’s largest shipyard in 1942—then watched its yards empty almost overnight. The hidden culprit: Washington’s own victory dividend.
2. Sugar-coated Torpedo: Tokyo’s 1950s Power Play
   Why the British thought they had the post-war shipping market locked up—until Japanese trading houses used surplus sugar profits to bankroll cut-price hulls and steal London’s crown.
3. The Apprentice Who Outran Both Masters
   Seoul, 1969: no deep-water tradition, no steel, no capital. Yet within twenty years Korean yards were launching more tonnage than anyone else. The secret weapon: a still-bitter Britain willing to license every blueprint it had.
4. Return of the Original King
   For thirteen centuries the biggest wooden fleets on the planet flew the dragon flag of China. After a hundred-year hiatus, the Middle Kingdom is once again launching more ships than the rest of the world combined—this time with robots, state credit, and a quiet plan to write the next maritime order.