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Loading... The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World…by Marc Levinson
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A well-disciplined history of the shipping container that is written with such engaging style that it transcends its subject. The focus of the history is rather too heavily US-centric for a full history but the writer does not disregard developments in Asia and Europe. (  ) TheoClarke | Nov 25, 2009 |  경제,비즈니스 leese | Nov 23, 2009 | The Box by Marc Levinson (no relation, despite the fact he too writes books on transportation) is a new book on the history of container shipping. It is a fascinating account of this method of shipping's birth in multiple places, but primarily fostered by Malcom McLean, through its growth and expansion, driving the evolution of both the ships that containers sail on as well as the ports at which they are transferred. The book covers topics ranging from labor union issues with automation, the politics of New York as container shipping moved to New Jersey, through the politics of competing standard setting processes that determined the size of containers, and the Vietnam War as the military turned to standardized containers to untangle the shipping mess found in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. It is an exceedingly well-written book that I would recommend to anyone interested in history of technology, transportation, economics, or 20th century American history. It is well researched, with over 85 pages of notes and references (for 278 pages of text). The book, penned by an economist, (in fact, by a writer for The Economist) clearly points out the tradeoffs between fixed and variable costs of moving to this incredibly capital intensive mode, and of the increasing scale of container ships and ports. The conflicts between port uses and other land uses were not brought out as much as it might have been, though the location of new container ports at new sites far from old city centers is an indicator that price of land, as well as institutional legacy, are important costs that central cities impose on trade. -- dml (  ) dlevinson | Jan 8, 2009 | Astonishing. Read it and be amazed how a humble (!) box has changed the world. ( ) hmib | Nov 4, 2008 | A brilliant look at how logistics standardization in the form of containers has revolutionized the transportation business and the modern world. Levinson is an amazing guide to the strange lost world a few decades past where prices were administered, competition regulated, and cozy cartels ruled. Ports were harbours of inefficiency and dens of thieves. Hayek's dedication to the socialists of all parties rings true when rhetorics advocated free markets and practice stifled competition. Having learned to squeeze money out of the trucking business, one man, Malcom McLean, saw the opportunity to profit from the mess and improve efficiency. In acts of daring, financial acumen and brinkmanship, McLean established a container shipping business. Just as in any revolution, he himself was overtaken by history. One of the joys of Levinson's book is that he shows changes to be both evolutionary and revolutionary - with plenty of evolutionary dead ends (McLean's non-standard 35 ft. container), ship scale arms races and booms and busts. The container changed the whole transportation infrastructure - making and breaking communities. Levinson tells the story of the Port Authority of New York on the East Coast, Oakland and Seattle on the West Coast and glimpses at Rotterdam and Singapore. The 278 page book is over much too soon and there remain many stories to be told, eg I would have liked to read a chapter about the IT revolution of warehouse and shipping management as well as a pointer to GPS and tracking systems. Curiously for a personalized economic history, the book features not a single illustration. (  )3  jcbrunner | Jun 23, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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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.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400)
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