Sublime

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

Transportation has become so efficient that for many purposes, freight costs do not much affect economic decisions.

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.

Reshaping the business of shipping was left to an outsider with no maritime experience whatsoever, a self-made trucking magnate named Malcom Purcell McLean.

The Box, I hope, has contributed to public understanding that inadequate port, road, and rail infrastructure can cause economic harm by raising the cost of moving freight.

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.

McLean had always preferred consolidation to competition; had the U.S. government not blocked him, he would have acquired Sea-Land’s sole East Coast competitor, Seatrain Lines, in 1959, and its main competitor to Puerto Rico, Bull Line, in 1962. Now, on Sea-Land’s behalf, he committed $1.2 billion of R. J. Reynolds’s money to an audacious deal with