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.
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.
Published in hardcover on the fiftieth anniversary of the first
container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the
shipping container. Now with a new chapter, The Box tells the dramatic
story of how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur
turned containerization from an impractical idea into a phenomenon that
transformed economic geography, slashed transportation costs, and made
the boom in global trade possible.
