The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
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About this ebook
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible.
But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential.
Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.
Editor's Note
Smart & Readable...
Smart & imminently readable, this book tells the dramatic (yes, dramatic) history of how the unassuming shipping container revolutionized the way we transport goods and transformed the global economy.
Read more from Marc Levinson
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for The Box
14 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not bad so far!
Will update after I finish. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Useful and thorough, Levinson has obviously read everything on the subject.The writing is dense and hard to follow at times, and the lack of an overall economic view of containers is noteworthy. He has a few comments but clearly containerization reduced the cost of trade by 90%-95% and led to the globalized economy we now have. Very good on McLean and the origins of the industry. Should be read in conjunction with Sharpsteen's The Docks which focuses on one port and its current activities.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Call this an examination of how the right innovation at the right time can have a catalytic impact, as a cadre of determined businessman (most notably one Malcom McLean of the United States) sought to wring profits from a stagnant industry and helped to unleash a revolution. The question is unanswerable whether the box begot globalization or whether globalization would have called forth some comparable innovation, but it is certainly now the symbol of the global world economic order. If Levinson does nothing else he reminds one of the deep inefficiencies represented by the world of manually-loaded tramp steamers, the stagnant communities that served the industry, and the out-dated regulations that constrained trade. While one can denounce the spirit of deregulation now run rampant, it's good to be reminded that this spirit had real justification a generation ago. The question that Levinson can't answer is whether this revolution has so refined itself that it is now set for its own unforeseen systemic failure.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5On seeing this book my wife exclaimed “I can’t believe you bought a book about shipping containers!” - which, translated, meant “I can believe you bought a book about shipping containers, and I still wonder daily how it is that we ended up together.” The reason I bought it, of course, is that it sounded like a fascinating and very readable history of the development of container shipping, and the effect this has had on the global economy. Thankfully I was right - it is both fascinating and very readable.The central thesis is that container shipping - while not in itself a particularly mind-blowing idea - was a necessary precondition for globalisation. The rise of containerised freight brought dramatic increases in efficiency and incredible decreases in cost, but it did a lot more than just change the cost of shipping something from point A to point B. Containerisation resulted in a standard unit of bulk freight, and the means of seamlessly transitioning freight between different modes of transportation. With this system in place it becomes possible for a shipper to specify the destination of a container and not have to worry too much about how it gets there. As hard as it is for many of us to imagine these days, this was not always the case.Much of the book deals with the challenges faced in making containerisation a reality. Despite being a simple idea, there was enormous resistance to begin with. Obstacles included overbearing government regulation on freight of all types, the total dominance of international shipping cartels, and the degree to which labour unions consisting of tens of thousands of dockworkers controlled ports around the world.However, container shipping turned out to be a transformative technology - with effects far in excess of those predicted by the people who fought to make it a reality. Once the idea was embraced it took force with astonishing rapidity, transforming the waterfronts and economies of many cities around the world and destroying tens of thousands of waterfront labour jobs in the process.The most important effects had little to do with shipping itself - it turned out that containerised freight provided a massive increase in flexibility, enabling brand new approaches to production and leading to boom in global trade.The only thing the book is missing is a chapter on the use being made now of containers for purposes other than freight - for example as a means of deploying self-contained datacenters, or as a basic structural element for low-cost modular architecture.I really enjoyed this book, and found it an excellent treatment of a subject that - let’s be honest - sounds slightly dull. Much of the story focuses on Malcom McLean - a US trucker whose intuitive grasp of the freight business lead him to create the first dedicated container shipping service. This focus helps give the book a biographical narrative which ties it all together very well, and while the book goes into much more detail about circumstances in the US it manages to avoid the trap of pretending that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.Heartily recommended!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Astonishing. Read it and be amazed how a humble (!) box has changed the world.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A brilliant look at how logistics standardization in the form of containers has revolutionized the transportation business and the modern world. Levinson is an amazing guide to the strange lost world a few decades past where prices were administered, competition regulated, and cozy cartels ruled. Ports were harbours of inefficiency and dens of thieves. Hayek's dedication to the socialists of all parties rings true when rhetorics advocated free markets and practice stifled competition.Having learned to squeeze money out of the trucking business, one man, Malcom McLean, saw the opportunity to profit from the mess and improve efficiency. In acts of daring, financial acumen and brinkmanship, McLean established a container shipping business. Just as in any revolution, he himself was overtaken by history. One of the joys of Levinson's book is that he shows changes to be both evolutionary and revolutionary - with plenty of evolutionary dead ends (McLean's non-standard 35 ft. container), ship scale arms races and booms and busts. The container changed the whole transportation infrastructure - making and breaking communities. Levinson tells the story of the Port Authority of New York on the East Coast, Oakland and Seattle on the West Coast and glimpses at Rotterdam and Singapore. The 278 page book is over much too soon and there remain many stories to be told, eg I would have liked to read a chapter about the IT revolution of warehouse and shipping management as well as a pointer to GPS and tracking systems. Curiously for a personalized economic history, the book features not a single illustration.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fascinating book covering the innovation of the shipping container and its adoption from the 1960s through the 1980s. This book is noteworthy for its coverage not only of the shipping container technology, but for its coverage of the entire system of goods transportation and the complex inter-relationships between technology innovation, transport modalities and their relative efficiency (cost), government regulation, and labor relations.