The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Softcover

Levinson, Marc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691170819 ISBN 13: 9780691170817

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marc Levinson is an economist in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an economist at a leading investment bank, and finance and economics editor at The Economist.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The continuous decline of ocean shipping costs in the last 40 years is rarely credited for the growth of global trade in contemporary literature. Don't miss this amazing history."--George Stalk, Boston Consulting Group and author of Surviving the China Riptide

"An excellent piece of work."--Bruce Nelson, Dartmouth College

"This book is dynamite. The experts who tell you the transistor and microchips changed the world are off base. The ugly, unglamorous, little-noticed shipping container has changed the world. Without it, there would be no globalization, no Wal-Mart, maybe even no high-tech. And what looks like low-tech is in fact a breathtaking technological innovation. Marc Levinson's sparkling and authoritative story is great fun to read, but it is spectacular economic history as well."--Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

"Fascinating, informative, wonderfully historicized. This is a terrific untold story."--Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of Wal-Mart: the Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism

"The adoption of the modern shipping container may be a close second to the Internet in the way it has changed our lives. It has made products from every corner of the world commonplace and accessible everywhere. It has dramatically cut the cost of transportation and thereby made outsourcing a significant issue. It has transformed the world's port cities, and more. This book, very nicely written, makes a fascinating set of true stories of an apparently mundane subject, and dramatically illustrates how simple innovations can transform our lives."--William Baumol, Director, Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, author of The Free-Market Innovation Machine

"In the second half of the twentieth century, an innovation came along that would transform the way the world did business. . . . I'm not talking about software. I'm talking about the shipping industry, and in particular an innovation you might not have thought much about: the shipping container. It is the subject of an excellent book I read this summer called The Box. . . . The story of this transition is fascinating and reason enough to read the book. But in subtle ways The Box also challenges commonly held views about business and the role of innovation."--Bill Gates, Gatesnotes

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The Box

How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

By Marc Levinson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17081-7

Contents

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, 

CHAPTER 1

The World the Box Made

On April 26, 1956, a crane lifted fifty-eight aluminum truck bodies aboard an aging tanker ship moored in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the Ideal-X sailed into Houston, where fifty-eight trucks waited to take on the metal boxes and haul them to their destinations. Such was the beginning of a revolution.

Decades later, when enormous trailer trucks rule the highways and trains hauling nothing but stacks of boxes rumble through the night, it is hard to fathom just how much the container has changed the world. In 1956, China was not the world's workshop. It was not routine for shoppers to find Brazilian shoes and Mexican vacuum cleaners in stores in the middle of Kansas. Japanese families did not eat beef from cattle raised in Wyoming, and French clothing designers did not have their exclusive apparel cut and sewn in Turkey or Vietnam. Before the container, transporting goods was expensive — so expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway around the world.

What is it about the container that is so important? Surely not the thing itself. A soulless aluminum or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end: the standard container has all the romance of a tin can. The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is, but in how it is used. The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication on the way.

The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of ill-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories. Cities that had been centers of maritime commerce for centuries, such as New York and Liverpool, saw their waterfronts decline with startling speed, unsuited to the container trade or simply unneeded, and the manufacturers that endured high costs and antiquated urban plants in order to be near their suppliers and their customers have long since moved away. Venerable ship lines with century-old pedigrees were crushed by the enormous cost of adapting to container shipping. Merchant mariners, who had shipped out to see the world, had their traditional days-long shore leave in exotic harbors replaced by a few hours ashore at a remote parking lot for containers, their vessel ready to weigh anchor the instant the high-speed cranes finish putting huge metal boxes off and on the ship.

Even as it helped destroy the old economy, the container helped build a new one. Sleepy harbors such as Busan and Seattle moved into the front ranks of the world's ports, and massive new ports were built in places like Felixstowe, in England, and Tanjung Pelepas, in Malaysia, where none had been before. Small towns, distant from the great population centers, could take advantage of their cheap land and low wages to entice factories freed from the need to be near a port to enjoy cheap transportation. Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever lengthening supply chains. Poor countries, desperate to climb the rungs of the ladder of economic development, could realistically dream of becoming suppliers to wealthy countries far away. Huge industrial complexes mushroomed in places like Los Angeles and Hong Kong, only because the cost of bringing raw materials in and sending finished goods out had dropped like a stone.

This new economic geography allowed firms whose ambitions had been purely domestic to become international companies, exporting their products almost as effortlessly as selling them nearby. If they did, though, they soon discovered that cheaper shipping benefited manufacturers in Thailand or Italy just as much. Those who had no wish to go international, who sought only to serve their local clientele, learned that they had no choice: like it or not, they were competing globally because the global market was coming to them. Shipping costs no longer offered shelter to high-cost producers whose great advantage was physical proximity to their customers; even with customs duties and time delays, factories in Malaysia could deliver blouses to Macy's in Herald Square more cheaply than could blouse manufacturers in the nearby lofts of New York's garment district. Multinational manufacturers — companies with plants in different countries — transformed themselves into international manufacturers, integrating once isolated factories into networks so that they could choose the cheapest location in which to make a particular item, yet still shift production from one place to another as costs or exchange rates might dictate. In 1956, the world was full of small manufacturers selling locally; by the end of the twentieth century, purely local markets for goods of any sort were few and far between.

For workers, of course, this has all been a mixed blessing. As consumers, they enjoy infinitely more choices thanks to the global trade the container has stimulated. By one careful study, the United States imported four times as many varieties of goods in 2002 as in 1972, generating a consumer benefit — not counted in official statistics — equal to nearly 3 percent of the entire economy. The competition that came with increased trade has diffused new products with remarkable speed and has held down prices so that average households can partake. The ready availability of inexpensive imported consumer goods has boosted living standards around the world.

As wage earners, on the other hand, workers have every reason to be ambivalent. In the decades after World War II, wartime devastation created vast demand while low levels of international trade kept competitive forces under control. In this exceptional environment, workers and trade unions in North America, Western Europe, and Japan were able to negotiate nearly continuous improvements in wages and benefits, while government programs provided ever stronger safety nets. The workweek grew shorter, disability pay was made more generous, and retirement at sixty or sixty-two became the norm. The container helped bring an end to that unprecedented advance. Low shipping costs helped make capital even more mobile, increasing the bargaining power of employers against their far less mobile workers. In this highly integrated world economy, the pay of workers in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691170819
• ISBN 13: 9780691170817
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 516
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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