Sublime

Oakland had never hosted a containership, but it immediately began to promote itself as a future containerport. Nutter dreamed up a lease very different from the norm of so many cents per ton: Sea-Land would pay a minimum fee high enough to cover the cost of building its terminal and would pay more as its tonnage rose, but beyond a certain point th

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

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