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The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
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Sales rank 120,242
Customers rating (based on 34 reviews)
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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.
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| Publisher | Princeton University Press | | Release date | 03/2006 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $24.95 | | Our price | $19.96 (you save 20.00%) | | Used price | from $7.15 |
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The world in a box: Containerisation altered the economics of shipping and with that the flow of world trade. Without the container, there would be no globalisation. (@ The Economist)
Globalization In A Can: An engaging tale of how the shipping container helped usher in globalization.
(@ BusinessWeek)
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 Everyone should read this
Think of something you bought recently. Anything. Chances are, at some point on its journey to you, it and/or various pieceparts of it, spent some time in a shipping container. Chances also are that 50 years ago, you would not have had access to that same item. Or if you did, it was very expensive.
I work in international trade, so I have more than the usual interest in the subject. I bore my friends trying to get them to see how an unassuming thing like a box has changed their lives. But from now on, I'll let Levinson's book do the explaining for me.
If you're starved for time...
This is an excellent book, and highly recommended, though if you're a casual reader, the narrative does tend to get bogged down in the minutiae of labor union history, container sizes, and government regulation in the 1960s-70s. Somehow, Levinson makes this interesting, believe it or not. However, if you're starved for time, I recommend reading only the last 2 chapters -- they contain most of the larger themes and lessons about containerization.
A brilliant read - Easily the best book I've read so far this year
I didn't expect this to be a riveting book. But I literally couldn't put it down. It's principally a book about the economic and social impact of the humble shipping container, but it's also (and perhaps most profoundly) a book about human imagination. On the one hand, there are the people who have a vision for revolutionizing the way things are done, though without really understanding just how much their ideas and hunches will change not
just their own immediate situation but the circumstances of so many others. Which brings in the other side of the equation, namely those people threatened by new ideas, and who try in vain to prevent or dull them like the waterfront unions which sought - quite understandably - to preserve the status quo. As much a biography of the historically significant players and their personalities as a record of global economic change and development, this book is well researched and written in a no nonsense yet enjoyable style by an author intrigued by the apparent lack of attention the shipping container has received over the past 50 years. You may not presently be intrigued by the subject, but you won't regret reading this fascinating and thought provoking account.
Good book on Container Shipping/Containerships.
Awesome,Informative,Shipping/Container ship book, The Box indeed has changed the world, I call it the Container, The Sea Container,Rail(Domestic), etc. Have shaped our lives, and this book explains.
 The prosaic box that changed our world
Shipping containers are prosaic and uninteresting, but they are key to the way we live our lives and earn our livings.
Globalization has had a profound impact on how we work, how we shop and how we live. One of the key enablers of globalization is low cost reliable shipping. Shipping container and the specialized ships, ports, trains and trucks that haul them are key to that. Marc Levinson's book describes their history and how they came to have such a key role in our economy.
The Box describes the world of shipping before containerization, when everything was shipped breakbulk when longshoremen and their powerful unions controlled the docks. Levinson focuses on Malcom McLean, the entrepreneur who was the driving force behind the acceptance of the container. The Box describes the difficult process of getting containers past the unions that controlled the docks and bureaucracies that controlled shipping prices.
The author also describes the boom and bust cycles that followed container shipping's acceptance. We read about the many false starts and experiments along the way. What we have ended up with may seem obvious now, but it was not fifty years ago when this started. He also describes the effect of containers on ports and labor in the ports. The huge effect containerization has had on global industries is reviewed from a high level.
The Box is well researched with extensive end notes and a large bibliography. The author writes well and has included enough about the people involved to keep the book from being too dry. This is a business and economics history, so it will probably only be of interest to a narrow group of readers, despite how important the topic is.
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