The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

Behind this frenzied expansion of long-neglected ports was the emergence of an entirely new line of thought about economic growth. Manufacturing was almost universally regarded as the bedrock of a healthy local economy in the 1960s, and much of the value of a port, aside from jobs on the docks, was that transportation-conscious manufacturers would

Demand, robust though it was, could not possibly keep up with this explosion of supply. The result was a new and painful experience for the shipping industry: a rate war.

These new ports, by and large, were privately managed, and in some cases privately financed. Their creation was a deliberate response to the economics of container shipping, in which keeping the ship moving is what matters most. Only the biggest ports are worth a time-consuming stop: in 2014, 46 percent of world container shipments moved through ju

“Unless a container terminal is available in Hong Kong to serve these ships the trading position of the Colony will be affected detrimentally.” And no government anywhere was more aggressive in preparing for the container age than Singapore’s.

Interest in such a remedy was widespread. Shippers wanted cheaper transport, less pilferage, less damage, and lower insurance rates. Shipowners wanted to build bigger vessels, but only if they could spend more time at sea, earning revenue, and less time in port. Truckers wanted to be able to deliver to and pick up from the docks without hour upon h

Asked later whether he had considered ways to shelter some of his wealth from the risks of entering the maritime business, his answer was an unequivocal “No.” McLean explained: “You’ve got to be totally committed.”

It was easy enough to conclude that containers would change the business, but it was not obvious that they would revolutionize it. Containers, said Jerome L. Goldman, a leading naval architect, were “an expedient” that would do little to reduce costs. Many experts considered the container a niche technology, useful along the coast and on routes to

United States Lines would achieve what it took to succeed in container shipping: scale. Scale was the holy grail of the maritime industry by the late 1970s. Bigger ships lowered the cost of carrying each container. Bigger ports with bigger cranes lowered the cost of handling each ship. Bigger containers—the 20-foot box, shippers’ favorite in the ea

Whether containerships and containerports have reached their maximum efficient size, or even larger and costlier ships and ports could give rise to yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe, is a question of considerable consequence for the world economy.8

I knew that the history of containerization would show itself to be a far more absorbing topic than readers imagined, and I figured that economists and logistics specialists might be intrigued by my argument that tumbling transport costs were critical in opening the way to what we now call globalization.