THE BOX, demystifying the invisible world-changing role of shipping

THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
MARC LEVINSON
Princeton University Press
$19.95 paperback and ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. "The Box" tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible.

But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential.
Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.

Many thanks to the publisher for my ARC of the second edition

My Review: Technological disruptors play an immense role in human history. None more so than the humble shipping container, the subject of this four-hundred-page study by Economist and Author Levin. What began, I gather, as an interest in the life of Malcom McLean (no, I didn't misspell "Malcolm"), whose 1956 shipment of twenty-eight containers of his own design onto ships also modified to his design, to Houston, Texas, began the era of rapid globalization, turned into an economist's dream: a chance to study the economic and social and political impact of a disruptive technology before its fiftieth year of existence arrived. (2021 NOTE we are now in the sixty-fifth year of the container revolution, and even the pandemic can't stop the trains, ships, and trucks from rolling.)

It will surprise few that McLean's efforts to bring the container-shipping revolution to the world were opposed by the vested interests of the day, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the International Longshoremen's Association. These behemoths, unstoppable and uncontrollable at the time, did their damnedest to impede, derail (!), and alter the disruptor into a new, toothless, challengeless arm of the status quo:

On domestic routes, government policy discouraged competition among ship lines. On international routes, rates for every commodity were fixed by conferences, a polite term for cartels, and the most important cargo, military freight, was handed out among U.S.-flag carriers without the nuisance of competitive bidding. Decisions about buying, building, or selling ships, about leasing terminals, and about sailing new routes all depended upon government directives.

So the bosses, the workers, and the government weren't on board with this containerization idea...but guess who was?

The United States Armed Forces.

As longshoremen collectively rolled over after an initial three-year contract negotiated in 1959, it was a signal of doom for The Labor Movement in US politics. The Armed Forces needed huge amounts of stuff, all kinds of stuff, in unprecedented mountains. And unlike World War II, there weren't strong backs everywhere glad to do it. But containers? Now, these babies would damned near do all the work that men used to do, and for a highly recoverable investment. SeaLand, as Malcom McLean had renamed his trucking outfit metastasized into a shipping conglomerate, stepped up to do the job. Cheaply, safely, efficiently.

That's a really exciting chapter in shipping history...followed by the urpsome evil profiteering regime we see today, unregulated shippers and deregulated producers of the poisons we're told we need to exist (and sadly enough, they're correct often enough to make re-regulation into a donnybrook the environment isn't likely to win). This is where reading Economist Levinson's American triumphalism become less pleasurable. While I wasn't old enough to fight in Vietnam, I was old enough to know I didn't like eating my dinner with Uncle Walter (Cronkite, for the younger crowd) intoning the number of dead boys rotting in a place I knew nothing much about and cared less for. The fact that they ate US-grown food and shot US-made bullets at an unprecedented rate was transparent to me then, and the subsequent use of that fact as a stick to bludgeon ever-more-pusillanimous "regulators" into loosening what protections are left for labor is illness-making.

As one would expect from a former editor of The Economist magazine, Author Levinson doesn't dawdle among the stylistic stargazer lilies. Also as one would expect from a book written by an economist, there are tables, equations, maps and graphs...all the accoutrements of learnèd academical case-making. But, and this is a key realization to learn, the author's sentences (while tending towards the sesquipedalian) are limpidly clear. He is tendentious, but not tedious, and this is a rare, delightful conjunction of traits.

Among this book's most merited accolades, according to his publisher's page for this title:

Winner of the 2007 Anderson Medal, Society for Nautical Research
Winner of the 2007 Bronze Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
Honorable Mention for the 2006 John Lyman Book Award, Science and Technology category, North American Society for Ocean History
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)