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

To look at a container ship is to see the world as a set of modular units. The ship itself: a gigantic rectangle. Steel containers form an improbable stack of colorful bricks atop the deck, held together with twist-locks and lashing rods. Inside the shipping containers square wooden pallets subdivide the space, a nesting layer of modularity that bu... See more

Potts’s ambitions were unbounded: he believed that fast-freight companies, by controlling transshipping points, loading facilities, and specialized carriers like tank cars, could emerge as the freight balancer and rate-setter for all railroad traffic. The cross-ownership with the Pennsylvania ensured that the Empire’s facilities were designed to op

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It was a clear victory for the Tidewater. Ever the realist, Rockefeller conceded that the future of oil transport lay with long-distance pipelines and kicked off a massive construction program that quickly dwarfed the Tidewater’s. For his part, Benson and his shareholders had signaled almost from the start that they would be happy to be acquired. I

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By the time the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, much had changed in Key West. Most of the cigar factories had moved northward to Tampa, lured by subsidies dangled by local business leaders. A peaceful Caribbean political situation had led to a substantial decrease in size of the Navy base. And the conversion of many oceangoing steamships from coal

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