The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a new chapter by the author

Growing intercontinental trade required new modes of specialized shipping. Bulk carriers with large compartments and massive watertight hatches were designed to transport coal, grain, ores, cement, and fertilizer, and they could be rapidly loaded and unloaded. But the greatest shipping innovation came in 1957, when a North Carolina trucker Malcolm

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This tripling of shipped mass between 1973 and 2019 required (when measured in deadweight tons) a near quadrupling of the global merchant fleet capacity. Deadweight tonnage of oil tankers slightly more than tripled, the tonnage of container ships increased about 4.5 times, and the size of the global container fleet expanded roughly 10-fold in 45 ye

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After the Second World War, crude oil tankers were the first vessels to grow in capacity as the rapid economic growth of Western Europe and Japan coincided with the availability of newly discovered Middle Eastern giant oil fields (Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, the world’s largest, was found in 1948 and began flowing in 1951), and exports of this inexpensi

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