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

The equation was simple: the bigger the port, the bigger the vessels it could handle and the faster it could empty them, reload them, and send them back out to sea. Bigger ports were likely to have deeper berths, more and faster cranes, better technology to keep track of all the boxes, and better road and rail services to move freight in and out. T

These two unrelated developments—the rise of New York, the neglect of Tampa and Mobile—revealed the economics that would affect seaports as container shipping grew. For ports, capturing container traffic was going to be expensive, requiring investments out of all proportion to what had come before. For ship lines, the days when vessels meandered al

These waterfront realities meant that shipping was a highly labor-intensive industry in the postwar era. Depression and war had sharply curtailed the construction of privately built merchant vessels since the 1920s, so ship operators had little capital invested in the business.

On the larger stage of Eurasian or global economic competition, the maritime sector of the European economy, for all its success in developing the commodity trades across the Atlantic, and in finding customers among the expatriate Europeans in the Americas, was simply too small, too restricted in economic and demographic capacity, to aspire to glob