Sublime

Oakland had never hosted a containership, but it immediately began to promote itself as a future containerport. Nutter dreamed up a lease very different from the norm of so many cents per ton: Sea-Land would pay a minimum fee high enough to cover the cost of building its terminal and would pay more as its tonnage rose, but beyond a certain point th

These two unrelated developments—the rise of New York, the neglect of Tampa and Mobile—revealed the economics that would affect seaports as container shipping grew. For ports, capturing container traffic was going to be expensive, requiring investments out of all proportion to what had come before. For ship lines, the days when vessels meandered al

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

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

McLean had always preferred consolidation to competition; had the U.S. government not blocked him, he would have acquired Sea-Land’s sole East Coast competitor, Seatrain Lines, in 1959, and its main competitor to Puerto Rico, Bull Line, in 1962. Now, on Sea-Land’s behalf, he committed $1.2 billion of R. J. Reynolds’s money to an audacious deal with

In a place where replacement parts could not simply be ordered from a nearby distributor, the chance that something would go wrong, blowing budgets and cost calculations, was very high. McLean was running a commercial operation in a war zone, and betting that he could control costs well enough to make a profit from his fixed-price bid.27 The gamble

The equation was simple: the bigger the port, the bigger the vessels it could handle and the faster it could empty them, reload them, and send them back out to sea. Bigger ports were likely to have deeper berths, more and faster cranes, better technology to keep track of all the boxes, and better road and rail services to move freight in and out. T