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

It all started in April 1956 when an oil tanker transported 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From thereon, container shipping developed into a huge industry and revolutionised global trade. Could you have ever imagined a global level trade business had shipping containers not existed? In his book “The Box”, Marc Levinson tells the story of how shipping containers were created, the struggle leading up to its widespread adoption, and the drastic reduction in transportation costs that were caused by containerization.

The drive and persistence of entrepreneur Malcom Mclean is what turned containerization into the widespread industry that it is today. However, it is not something that just happened overnight. Levinson talks about how the word “container” was interpreted differently by different people and how the diversity of containers also posted challenges (pg. 170, 2nd para). Raising huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports was another challenge. Endless negotiations with organised labour industry (which also acted as a “bottleneck” in this case), as well as negotiations on standards were executed with a lot of efforts. Marc Levinson specially uses Vietnam War as a backdrop to explain the real impact of containerisation. The 1965 war was logistically a mess for the US army, and it took immense efforts on Mclean’s part to convince the army of the usefulness of shipping containers (pg. 243)

Furthermore, Marc Levinson uses previously neglected sources to highlight how container devastated traditional ports such as NY port authority, and London and allowed previously obscure ports such as Oakland to grow (pg. 197-198).  Shipping became so cheap with the use of container that soon Asia became a global hub for manufacturing and made availability of low-cost products to consumers a reality.

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