The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger – Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

Amazon.com Price: $9.99 (as of 11/10/2019 03:11 PST- Details)

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Description

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 imaginable. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container’s creation, the decade of struggle before it used to be widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

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 vanguard of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, in addition to delicate negotiations on standards that made it imaginable for almost any container to go back and forth on any truck or train or ship. In the long run, it took McLean’s success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container’s potential.

Drawing on up to now 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 up to now 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 grow to be the world’s workshop and brought consumers a up to now impossible variety of low-cost products from around the world.

Published in hardcover on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. Now with a new chapter, The Box tells the dramatic story of how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur turned containerization from an impractical idea into a phenomenon that transformed economic geography, slashed transportation costs, and made the boom in global trade imaginable.

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