Box

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. 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. 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 possible.

Marc Levinson

Preface ix
Acknowledgments to the Second Edition xvii
Chapter 1 The World the Box Made 1
Chapter 2 Gridlock on the Docks 21
Chapter 3 The Trucker 47
Chapter 4 The System 72
Chapter 5 The Battle for New York's Port 102
Chapter 6 Union Disunion 135
Chapter 7 Setting the Standard 170
Chapter 8 Takeoff 202
Chapter 9 Vietnam 230
Chapter 10 Ports in a Storm 254
Chapter 11 Boom and Bust 285
Chapter 12 The Bigness Complex 310
Chapter 13 The Shippers' Revenge 329
Chapter 14 Just in Time 355
Chapter 15 Adding Value 375
Notes 391
Bibliography 465
Index 491