The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger | Marc Levinson | How the container wrought a social and economic revolution

books:

The Box: How the S...

	The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger Marc Levinson Princeton University Press, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Deserves a wider audience than it will get

It's hard now to imagine a world without marine shipping containers, but the first one was loaded onto a ship, the Ideal-X, just 50 years ago. Precisely, on April 26, 1956, in Newark, N.J.
It turned the world upside down. It probably had as much to do with the success of Waikiki as the jet airliner, introduced in 1960.
The story has a hero, Malcom McLean, and it plays out, for him and for many others, as tragedy.
In "The Box," Marc Levinson makes business history read like a novel. Well, almost.
Like many simple, everyday things, the shipping container is more complicated than it looks. Just how do you design a steel box that can hold 20 tons but also has to be picked up without being touched by human hands and moved from ship to truck in less than a minute?
McLean, a North Carolina boy who founded a trucking empire in the days of heavy regulation in order to save $3, took the plunger's approach. In the Pacific, Matson Navigation Co. was also interested in converting from expensive breakbulk cargo handling, but it took the systems approach.
McLean beat Matson by two years, but Matson is still around (as the principal subsidiary of Alexander & Baldwin Inc.), while McLean's SeaLand survives today only as a subsidiary (a very large one) of a Danish business that didn't exist until 1973.
McLean did not imagine he was going to restructure the world economy, but his idea did that, which is why this book deserves a wider audience than business histories usually get.
The container killed off New York and London as important shipping ports. New York City now handles only a little more cargo each year than Tanjung Pelepas, Malaysia, which did not exist in 1990. Most of Britain's international trade now moves through Felixstowe.
Since most of the cost of moving a container comes while it's passing through a port, shipping costs are not materially affected no matter how long the at-sea leg is made. Hence, globalization.
The cheap labor of China was always there, it just wasn't accessible before McLean.
Although "The Box" barely refers to Hawaii, it is an obvious conclusion that a resort like Waikiki, which imports nearly everything except aloha, could not have offered cheap vacations to middle class American families if ocean transportation costs had remained as high as they were in the '50s.
Besides different business approaches on the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, the two oceans featured vastly different reactions by unions to the problem of adopting dock labor to containers.
In the Atlantic, the International Longshoreman's Association was antagonistic. The approach was suicidal, for its members and for their communities.
In the Pacific, commie bogeyman Harry Bridges forced conciliation on his reluctant membership, saving the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and opening the gates to a boom in Southern California.
Bridges, long dead, remains a name that American rightwingers use to scare the children into good behavior. If Republicans understood economics, they'd have built a statue to him in every port (except San Francisco, which did not benefit from containers because of its awkward railroad connections) in western America and Canada.
Levinson, a one-time journalist, knows how to write a book that can be read with pleasure. And profit.

for more information click here

How the container wrought a social and economic revolution

Commonplace objects that go almost un-noticed in daily life often conceal interesting stories. "The Box" by Marc Levinson is a case in point.

All of us have seen shipping containers being trucked along the highways or sitting in some factory, but we pay them little attention. Yet the cheap shoes we wear and the affordable digital cameras we tote around owe their low cost to a global economic revolution driven to a surprising extent by the shipping container.

Levinson tells this remarkable story in his exceptionally readable book. His description of working life on the docks and how break-bulk cargo was handled in pre-container days makes fascinating reading. Traditional waterfront work practices and communities disappeared with remarkable speed once containerisation took over.

The resulting derelict port areas and piers in most major waterfront cities in the world morphed into trendy shopping, eating and entertainment precincts - all due to a revolution wrought by the shipping container.

Industries that once clustered near major ports to minimise high transport costs were then free to spread widely and even globally in search of the lowest business costs.

Levinson writes about the technical and economic aspects of his subject in a very clear manner, fully accessible to the general reader. His explanation of the shipping "rate wars" (my term) of the late 1960's - early 1970's is a gem of clarity.

Not being familiar with the US transportation regulatory regime in the mid-20th century, I was astonished to read that the US ICC regulated routes and freight rates to a degree that seems ludicrous today. To take one example, an American trucking company had to get ICC approval to transport particular goods along defined routes and charge their customers regulated freight rates. Advocates of containerisation had to fight against such entrenched bureaucracies and vested interests.

Some longshore Unions were able to negotiate bizarre contracts to preserve dwindling jobs. In one case, filled containers delivered to a port had to be emptied on the docks and refilled with exactly the same cargo before the containers could be loaded onto a ship. The fact that shippers agreed to such contracts says a lot about relative power on the waterfront at that time.

The book is not only about the shipping container, it is also about the impact of transformative technologies on traditional communities and jobs and it is about how new technologies can re-order the economic landscape.

The book is excellently arranged and progresses through pre-container work practices on the docks, early experiments with containers, the struggles with unions, standard setting, development of dedicated container ports, the frenzy of ship building and resultant collapses and so on.

I was pleased to see virtually no padding in the book. Quite a few books of this genre don't really have enough material to fill a book, so they are padded out with marginally relevant background text.

Disappointingly, there are no photos or diagrams in the book. I wanted to see diagrams of the controversial "corner castings" that took up much time in standard setting meetings. I would also have liked to see photos of some of the historic early containers, cranes and ships - and waterfront life and work before containerisation.

I loved this book. I strongly recommend the book to readers interested in the popular genre of books on commonplace "objects" such as the shipping container. Those working in the shipping, transport and logistics industries may have never given a thought to the history of such a basic tool of their professions. They will also enjoy reading about its history.

for more information click here

Fascinating story about something we hardly think about

This book is an excellent introduction to a seemingly mundane topic: Container shipping. At first glance the thought of a whole book about the box cars that stuff gets transported in appears incredibly boring. Yet Levinson gives us fascinating details and stories about ports, longshoremen, the men and companies that made containers and containerships, and all the government bureaucracy involved. You'll gain a far greater appreciation for all that everything around you went through to get to you.

Good history, needs illustrations

I'm not going to repeat what the other reviewers have said. It's quite an interesting book. However, it needs illustrations and photographs:

* What did the early containers look like? He provides measurements but no picture.
* What did the loading cranes look like?
* How big were the early container ships compared to today's? He gives container counts but no pictures.
* Where was the New Jersey container dock? It would be nice to have a map showing this and New York's docks, so that we could see what additional transport was needed to get goods into New York City.
* In what order did containers get loaded and unloaded?
* How were container docks different in size and layout from breadbulk docks? He describes but a diagram would have helped a great deal here.
* What did the intermodal (train, truck) container vehicles look like?

Having more illustrations, maps, etc., would help explain things that are hard to convey in words alone.

for more information click here

Momentous Change

There are any number of remarkable historical inventions and technologies that have been, and will continue, to be counted as momentous in the impact they have made to our lives. The average person will never know, or care, about how significant the revolution in shipping technology, brought about by containerization, has been to our existance. That is very sad, inasmuch as our history as a seafaring nation is both long and filled with such events that continue to alter the world's transportation and economic systems. Mr. Levinson has done a remarkable job in recounting these developments. His book is well worth the read by both transportation professionals and anyone who consumes anything that is transported.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

products you might be interested in