Marc Levinson

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 finished putting huge metal boxes off and on the ship.

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 door 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.

Mysteriously, the container has escaped all three of these very lively fields of research. It has no engine, no wheels, no sails: it does not fascinate those captivated by ships and trains and planes, or by sailors and pilots. It lacks the flash to draw attention from those who study technological innovation. And so many forces have combined to alter economic geography since the middle of the twentieth cen­ tury that the container is easily overlooked. There is, half a century after its arrival, no general history of the container.
In telling the remarkable story of containerization, this book rep­resents an attempt to fill that historical void. It treats containerization not as shipping news, but as a development that has sweeping consequences for workers and consumers all around the globe. Without it, the world would be a very different place.