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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.
- Sales Rank: #255753 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Princeton University Press
- Published on: 2008-01-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.00" w x 1.00" l, 1.23 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
A book about the history of the shipping container? At first, one has to wonder why. (An eventuality not lost on the author, who muses "What is it about the container that is so important? Surely not the thing itself...the standard container has all the romance of a tin can.") The catch, though, is that Levinson, an economist, "treats containerization not as shipping news, but as a development that has sweeping consequences for workers and consumers all around the globe." That latter statement drives this book, which is about the economic ramifications of the shipping container-from the closing of traditional (and antiquated) ports to the rise of Asia as the world's preeminent provider of inexpensive consumer goods (distributed, naturally, using mammoth shipping containers). Levinson maintains his focus on the economics of shipping vast quantities of merchandise, organizing the book into snappy, thematic chapters on different facets of shipping ("The Trucker," and "Union Disunion," for instance), an approach that lends itself well to spot-reading. Throughout, the writing is clean-more informal than rigidly academic (union boss Teddy Gleason is "a voluble Irishman born hard by the New York docks")-making the book suitable for casual readers as well as students looking for a different take on the evolution of 20th-century world economics.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Winner of the 2007 Anderson Medal, Society for Nautical Research
Winner of the 2007 Bronze Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
Honorable Mention for the 2006 John Lyman Book Award, Science and Technology category, North American Society for Ocean History
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)
"One of the most significant, yet least noticed, economic developments of the last few decades [was] the transformation of international shipping. . . . The idea of containerization was simple: to move trailer-size loads of goods seamlessly among trucks, trains and ships, without breaking bulk. . . . Along the way, even the most foresighted people made mistakes and lost millions. . . . [A] classic tale of trial and error, and of creative destruction."--Virginia Postrel, The New York Times [See full review http://bit.do/Box-NYT-Postrel]
"Marc Levinson's concern is business history on a grand scale. He tells a moral tale. There are villains ... and there is one larger than life hero: Malcom McLean. . . . Levinson has produced a fascinating exposition of the romance of the steel container. I'll never look at a truck in the same way again."--Howard Davies, The Times (UK)
"Like much of today's international cargo, Marc Levinson's The Box arrives 'just in time.'. . . It is a tribute to the box itself that far-off places matter so much to us now: It has eased trade, sped up delivery, lowered prices and widened the offering of goods everywhere. Not bad for something so simple and self-contained."--Tim W. Ferguson, The Wall Street Journal
"[A] smart, engaging book. . . . Mr. Levinson makes a persuasive case that the container has been woefully underappreciated. . . . [T]he story he tells is that of a classic disruptive technology: the world worked in one fashion before the container came onto the scene, and in a completely different fashion after it took hold."--Joe Nocera, The New York Times [See full review http://bit.do/Box-NYT-Nocera]
"Mr Levinson. . . . makes a strong case that it was McLean's thinking that led to modern-day containerisation. It altered the economics of shipping and with that the flow of world trade. Without the container, there would be no globalization."--The Economist [See full review http://bit.do/Box-Economist]
"A fascinating new book. . . . [I]t shows vividly how resistance to technological change caused shipping movements to migrate away from the Hudson river to other East Coast ports."--Management Today [See full review http://bit.do/Box-MT]
"Marc Levinson's The Box . . . illustrates clearly how great risks are taken by entrepreneurs when entrenched interests and government regulators conspire against them. Even after these opponents are dispatched, technological and economic uncertainty plague the entrepreneur just as much as the vaunted 'first-mover advantage' blesses him, perhaps more. The story of the shipping container is the story of the opponents of innovation."--Chris Berg, Institute of Public Affairs Review
"International trade . . . owes its exponential growth to something utterly ordinary and overlooked, says author Marc Levinson: the metal shipping container.... The Box makes a strong argument. . . . Levinson . . . spins yarns of the men who fought to retain the old On the Waterfront ways and of those who made the box ubiquitous."--Michael Arndt, BusinessWeek [See full review http://bit.do/Box-BW-Arndt]
"[An] enlightening new history. . . . [The shipping container] was the real-world equivalent of the Internet revolution."--Justin Fox, Fortune [See full review http://bit.do/Box-Fortune-Fox]
"Marc Levinson's The Box is . . . broad-ranging and . . . readable. It describes not just the amazing course of the container-ship phenomenon but the turmoil of human affairs in its wake."--Bob Simmons, The Seattle Times [See full review http://bit.do/Box-ST-Simmons]
"Author and economist Marc Levinson recounts the little-known story of how the humble shipping container has revolutionized world commerce. He tells his tale using just the right blend of hard economic data and human interest. . . . Mr. Levinson's elegant weave of transportation economics, innovation, and geography is economic history at its accessible best."--David K. Hurst, Strategy + Business [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-Strategy-Hurst]
"This well-researched and highly readable book about the ubiquitous containers that carry so much of the world's freight will no doubt surprise most readers with its description of the immensity of the impact this simple rectangular steel box has had on global and regional economics, employment, labor relations, and the environment. . . . The Box makes for an excellent primer on innovation, risk taking, and strategic thinking. It's also a thoroughly good read."--Craig B. Grossgart, Taiwan Business Topics
"The ubiquitous shipping container . . . as Mark Levinson's multilayered study shows . . . has transformed the global economy."--The Australian
"By artfully weaving together the nuts and bolts of what happened at which port with the grand sweep of economic history, Levinson has produced a marvelous read for anyone who cares about how the interconnected world economy came to be."--Neil Irwin, Washington Post
"Here's another item we see every day that had a revolutionary effect. The shipping container didn't just rearrange the shipping industry, or make winners of some ports (Seattle and Tacoma among them). It changed the dynamics and economics of where goods are made and shipped to."--Bill Virgin, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Excellent."--J Bradford DeLong, The Edge Financial Daily
"An engrossing read. . . . The book is well written, with detailed notes and an index. I found it absorbing and informative from the first page."--Sydney Morning Herald
"A fascinating history of the shipping container."--Richard N. Cooper, Foreign Affairs [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-FE-Cooper]
"For sheer originality . . . [this book] by Marc Levinson, is hard to beat. The Box explains how the modern era of globalization was made possible, not by politicians agreeing to cut trade tariffs and quotas, but by the humble shipping container."--David Smith, The Sunday Times (London)
"Ingenious analysis of the phenomenon of containerism."--Stefan Stern, Financial Times [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-FT-Stern]
"This is a smoothly written history of the ocean shipping container. . . . Marc Levinson turns it into a fascinating economic history of the last 50 years that helps us to understand globalization and industrial growth in North America."--Harvey Schachter, Globe and Mail
"This is an ingenious analysis of containerization--a process that, Levinson argues, in fact made globalization possible."--Business Voice
"Using a blend of hard economic data and financial projections, combined with human interest, Levinson manages to provide insights into a revolution that changed transport forever and transformed world trade."--Leon Gettler, The Age [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-Age-Gettler]
"There is much to like about Marc Levinson's recent book, The Box. . . . Levinson uses rich detail, a combination of archival and anecdotal data to build his story, and is constantly moving across levels of observation. . . . And the story of the box is a very good read."--Administrative Science Quarterly
"A lively and entertaining history of the shipping container. . . . The Box does a fine job of demonstrating how exciting the container industry is, and how much economists stand to lose by ignoring it."--William Sjostrom, EH.Net [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-EH-Sjostrom]
"The Box is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in understanding the emergence of our contemporary 'globalized' world economy."--Pierre Desrochers, Independent Review [See full review http://bit.do/TheBox-IndReview-Desrochers]
"[T]he insights the book provides make it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in how international trade in goods has evolved over the last 50 years."--Meredith A. Crowley, World Trade Review
"The Box reveals the subject to be interesting and powerful, shedding light on all kinds of issues, from the role of trade unions to the Vietnam War."--NUMAST Telegraph
From the Back Cover
"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
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Didn't Really Deliver
By Andy in Washington
Shipping is always a subject that has fascinated me-from the Phoenicians to the Dutch and the Americans, the history of the world is the history of shipping. I had high hopes for this book, because I thought containerized shipping was one of the major technologies of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the book came up a little short.
=== The Good Stuff ===
* Marc Levinson takes a stab at a rather complex topic, and in some areas does quite well. The introduction of containerized shipping is also the death knell for powerful longshoremen's unions; the need for huge capital investments in port facilities, something that was always an afterthought; and the need to change the way just about every company does business.
* The author also does a reasonable job of describing the changes brought upon the world by the growth of the shipping container. Freight rates fell, which changed the way business was done in the world. But there were also changes in waterfront neighborhoods, creations of entirely new cities, and the decay and decline of what had always been major seaports.
* Malcolm Mclean, the founder of SeaLand, is profiled in this book, and he comes across as a interesting, if somewhat unfamiliar character. I definitely got a feel for his risk-taking, betting his company numerous times on what were little more than hunches about how shipping should work. There is also brief profiles of a few labor leaders, and their futile struggles to delay the loss of jobs to automated material handling in ports.
=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===
* While Mclean is profiled, I never really got a feel for the man. He stays aloof throughout the book, although his accomplishments and strategies are discussed numerous times.
* The book repeats itself quite a bit. As an example, the text must have stated 25 times that there are few useable records of shipping costs prior to 1980. OK, I got the point. And while on the subject, surely there are ways of estimating these.
* I am a bit of a geek, and was hoping for more insight on how the system really works. Who tracks all the containers? Who owns them, and how are they paid. How exactly does the process work by which a container is picked up by a truck at a factory, shipped by rail, loaded on a ship, shipped again by rail, and finally delivered by truck. Who manages the whole flow? How are the containers tracked? Is this what logistics companies do? Does it cost extra for your container to be safely in the hold rather than deck cargo? None of these types of topics were even hinted at, a major disappointment for me.
=== Summary ===
The book was OK, but came up short in my opinion. There was so much more I would have liked to know about how containerized shipping really works, none of which was included. The book is more a history of how port facilities were planned and developed to support containers, with some analysis of the global effects of this technology. If you are interested in how shipping and globalization influence each other, this is not a bad book. If you are mostly interested in how containers actually travel, you will be disappointed.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating and compelling hypothesis
By T. Graczewski
Like most inhabitants of earth, I never gave much thought to intermodal shipping. It wasn't until I served as an economic development officer in southern Afghanistan and began looking into ways we could more efficiently export the high value fruits and nuts grown locally to the lucrative markets of the Middle East that I discovered "the box": the ubiquitous forty-foot container we've all seen on tractor trailer chassis, cargo ships and holding yards. On Kandahar Airfield, where I was stationed for a year, these containers were everywhere; literally thousands of them, double stacked in lines a half mile long, most serving as temporary warehouses while waiting for a way out of Afghanistan.
As director of strategy and corporate development for a leading Silicon Valley software company, I also happen to be interested in disruptive technologies and business concepts, innovations that totally remake or create industries, the type of stuff that Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen often writes about. Thus, Marc Levinson's "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger," was the perfect book for me and, as it turned out, one of the most enjoyable, enlightening reads I've had all year.
In short, Levinson argues that containerization, which was introduced by the transportation pioneer Malcolm McLean in the early 1950s, did more than lower the cost of shipping. It fundamentally changed the world economy. And it did so in several ways.
First, it redefined the meaning of a port city. In the era of break bulk shipping, all-purpose cargo ships that are manually (and slowly and expensively) loaded and unloaded by longshoremen, it made sense to have manufacturing close to the docks to save on transportation costs. Once the container began to dominate shipping, the only purpose of a port was to load and unload containers as rapidly as possible using labor saving cranes. Associated industries like light manufacturing, insurance, freight forwarding and other services, once co-located with the docks, were no longer relevant to the waterfront. Such a change spelled the end of shipping as a major operation in numerous traditional port cities, from Baltimore and San Francisco to Liverpool and London. In the busiest port in the US, New York City, the massive new container facility operation across the harbor at Newark and Elizabeth wiped out the long established docks of Brooklyn and Manhattan with a suddenness that shocked politicians, labor bosses and shippers, alike.
'The primary reason for this change is that the container turned shipping into a capital intensive industry that thrived on economies of scale, making the once sleepy shipping industry look a lot like the hyper competitive US railroads of the 1850s. In the break bulk era, dockside labor accounted for the major part of operational costs and the expense of overland transportation made numerous port city venues necessary. The economics of the container ship, requiring regular debt payments to finance their construction and only earning revenue while underway, dictated that fewer ports were visited and more cargo was loaded at each. Suddenly, small port cities like Mobile and Tampa were simply passed by, devastating the local longshoremen unions and others reliant on the shipping industry. Meanwhile, upstart ports like Oakland, Singapore and Felixstowe in the UK emerged as major container shipping terminals.
Second, it changed the geography of global manufacturing. The efficiencies of container shipping reduced transportation costs so dramatically that they no longer figured significantly influenced end user prices, whereas in the break bulk days the cost of transoceanic shipping acted as a double digit tariff on imported goods. Suddenly, it made economic sense to relocate manufacturing facilities in distant, low labor cost countries and simply ship the goods halfway around the world in container ships.
Third, the economic revolution of the container was slow in coming. The real revolution didn't happen until the shippers (i.e. the makers of TVs, refrigerators, etc.) centralized operations and began to take advantage of container efficiencies, which also really weren't available until deregulation opened up opportunities for big shippers to save with long term contracts and steep bulk shipping discounts. Process innovations like Toyota's "just in time" supply chain, which gained popularity in the early 1980s, saw large corporations invest unprecedented time and energy to improve their logistics operations. Levinson writes that by the time the container dominated transoceanic shipping -- over 80% of all goods traveling by container -- the vast majority of cargo were not finished consumer goods but rather "intermediate goods," parts and supplies used for final manufacturing.
Several additional themes emerge from "The Box." One is that organized labor and government regulation, no matter how well meaning, are often the most powerful inhibiters to business innovation, which comes with an enormous price tag that is ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for inferior goods. Next, few people present at the creation ever "get" (and profit from) the full affect of sweeping change that new technologies and processes like intermodal shipping. Unions failed to appreciate its potential impact and suffered dearly because of it. It took governments decades to figure out that they shouldn't be in the port management business and leave the extensive capital outlays to private investors. And most private sector investors were wrong about the speed at which the container would alter the economics of international shipping. RJ Reynolds foray into the business through the acquisition of McLean's Sea Land ended in disappointment for everyone, their shareholders foremost among them. And even McLean himself, the godfather of the container and a man lionized by Levinson, got the container very wrong on several occasions, including the 1980s bankruptcy of his acquired US Lines, which sought to establish a round-the-world container transportation route. Most intriguingly, those that did profit from the revolution, such as Hong Kong-based Evergreen and Denmark-based Maersk Lines, were no early movers or bleeding edge innovators. Indeed, they didn't get into the container shipping business until the 1970s.
As fascinating and compelling as the argument presented in "The Box" may be, it is only a hypothesis. Levinson has almost NO quantitative evidence to defend his claims. There are very few graphs and data tables in this book, although one gets the distinct impression it was not for lack of trying on Levinson's part. "The technical problems involved in measuring shipping rates during the 1960s and 1970s are so great that reliable measures of the container's price impact are unlikely to be developed," he glumly concludes.
I loved this book. You may, too, if you find the basic themes interesting -- innovation, globalization, and market disruption.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Tells about the details AND the big picture.
By Martin R. Goss
I first heard mention of this book on radio station KCRW a few months before finally getting around to ordering a copy, and I wasn't disappointed.
The Box is basically the story of a man who put 2 and 2 together and ended up becoming the one person most responsible for containerizing the shipping, trucking, and railroad industries. We are told of how Malcom McLean, president of a trucking company with no maritime experience, not only understood the barriers to cost-effective shipping, but figured out a way to overcome them.
Like Edison and Ford before him, McLean envisioned an interconnected system: he saw the forest and not just the trees. Containers were around for decades before McLean got into the act, but once he did, the product and the industry were never the same again.
We are also given thorough explanations of how the heads of the container shipping industry had to write the rules on the economics and mathematical balancing acts which had to be learned from experience in order to keep the initial experiments from being total failures.
An excellent book for reminding innovators that being a pioneer isn't always an easy feat.
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