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In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried
fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston.
From that humble 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.
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 Marv 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.
Marc Levinson is an economist in New
York and author of three previous books. He was formerly
finance and economics editor of the Economist, a
writer at Newsweek, and editorial director of the
Journal of Commerce.
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