The Box

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Box is perhaps best visualized in cinematic terms. Before The Box, your scenes on the docks had burly longshoremen loading boxes and using forklifts, bars and brawls, Irish or Italian union bosses and outsiders took a streetwise guide to find what they wanted. After The Box, it's stacks of truck-sized containers, a computer printout to find the location of the one with smuggled goods, and a shoot out in a deserted maze of metal. This is the story of how one cliche became the other one.

Up until 1955 maritime shipping was run by nautical men. "Breakbulk" cargo--stacked in ships cargo holds in whatever containers or pallets it came on--was loaded and unloaded at each port manually, moved onto the next truck or train to get to its destination. This work was hard, slow and expensive. Half the cost and often more than half the time of shipping an item across an ocean was spent with your cargo not actually moving more than a few hundred yards along the dock.

Malcolm McClean was a trucker by background with no romantic connection to the sea. For him, cargo at sea might as well have been on a highway or moving over a bridge, and in 1956 he started treating cargo precisely that way--truck sized containers went on in one port, off in another, and sped on truck or train to their final destination. This is highly simplified--it took a decade to really standardize on technology, business and labor changes, and another decade for customers to start taking advantage of the costs--but ultimately those loading costs dropped to nothing.

The changes this wrought were huge. Most directly, the geography of the world's ports changed. San Francisco and other venerable cities have piers but no shipping because they were obsoleted by the container--the cranes in Oakland, Seattle and Long Beach are what you need today. Factories no longer need to be next to the waterfront, or even on the same continent. The whole ability to run international supply chains depends on the cheap and predictable transport that means a factory in Tennessee can count on suppliers in Korea.

There are of course amazing benefits to this and costs as well. You probably could read this as an unbridled success story of capitalist efficiency but I was a bit more ambivalent. The early chapters deal with the longshoremens' unions, which use to define port communities but employment dwindled to almost nothing with automation. Amazingly enough, they were able to negotiate a cut of the profits from this automation as it was phased in. Others would leave without much to show, from maritime companies and ports that couldn't keep up with the new capital investments (or guessed wrong on how to invest) to the workers and industries who could now be outsourced.