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

Malcom McLean’s genius was acknowledged unanimously: almost everyone save the dockworkers’ unions thought that putting freight into containers was a brilliant concept. The idea that the container would cause a revolution in shipping, though, seemed more than a little far-fetched. At best, the container was expected to help ships recover a tiny shar

Whether containerships and containerports have reached their maximum efficient size, or even larger and costlier ships and ports could give rise to yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe, is a question of considerable consequence for the world economy.8

The container has enabled logistics centers such as these to prosper by adding value to global supply chains, capturing jobs that were once performed elsewhere, or not at all.

The second important result of shippers’ new power in the 1970s, along with their willingness to defy the shipping cartels, was their embrace of an idea that had been a heresy: the deregulation of transportation.

These new ports, by and large, were privately managed, and in some cases privately financed. Their creation was a deliberate response to the economics of container shipping, in which keeping the ship moving is what matters most. Only the biggest ports are worth a time-consuming stop: in 2014, 46 percent of world container shipments moved through ju

Container shipping thrives on volume: the more containers moving through a port or traveling on a ship or train, the lower the cost per box. Places with lower demand or poorer infrastructure will face higher transport costs and will be far less attractive manufacturing sites for the global market. In the 1970s and 1980s, when many U.S. industrial c

Malcom McLean sold his stock and quietly left the board of R. J. Reynolds Industries in February 1977. By all accounts, the marriage had not been a happy one. McLean was frustrated by the tobacco giant’s bureaucracy and bewildered by its repeated changes of strategy. Most of all, though, he was restless. “I am a builder, and they are runners,” McLe

A global recession would hit shipowners twice over: the lack of freight would cause their fixed cost per container to increase at the same time as it would weaken their ability to hold rates at profitable levels.

United States Lines would achieve what it took to succeed in container shipping: scale. Scale was the holy grail of the maritime industry by the late 1970s. Bigger ships lowered the cost of carrying each container. Bigger ports with bigger cranes lowered the cost of handling each ship. Bigger containers—the 20-foot box, shippers’ favorite in the ea