The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
TLDR: “Fascinating”
This is the story of standardization – how the world’s shipping industries agreed on what the standard container was going to be and how it was going to function and how that changed everything.
Prior to the shipping container, loading and unloading a ship was a real mess. There was a worker called a “longshoreman” or a “steveadore,” whose entire job it was to unload and load ships, one item at a time. They would take bags of whatever, or machines, or boxes, and carry them into or off of ships. It took forever.
Then a guy who owned a trucking company decided this was incredibly wasteful, and he started toying with the idea of just loading truck trailers onto ships. This eventually morphed into have a container on the ship that could be loaded onto a truck frame and driven away.
A couple chapters in the middle of the book are dedicated to the huge fight this caused with the laborers. The longshoreman did not want this to happen – their entire livelihood depended on the inefficiency in loading ships. They went on strike, they required labor guarantees, etc. But, eventually and inevitably, the efficiency of the containers won out, and their jobs were decimated.
What’s amazing is how much the change to containers trickled down. It affected how ships were built, how ports were built, how port cities developed, how piracy and smuggling was enabled, etc.. And the efficiencies of the container changed how products were made – China would literally not be the country it is today without the in-country manufacturing which is solely possible because of the shipping container.
I’m prepared to that this is the likely the world’s greatest success story of mass-standardization. It was a bumpy road that started in the 50s and spread through the 60s and 70s, but I don’t think that anything else has had as big of an effect on the world economy.
It gets slightly tedious in some places, but not by much. I’m kind of a sucker for logistics, and this is the story about how we move stuff around, which is the precursor for about any other economic activity in the world.
Book Data
- Author
- Marc Levinson
- Year
- Pages
- 392
- Acquired
- Not recorded
- Open Library
- OL4988033W
- Wikipedia
- The_Box_(Levinson_book)
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.