Marc Levinson

Marc Levinson is an American historian, economist and journalist whose career has moved between reporting, economic research and public policy. He edited the Journal of Commerce, covered business for Newsweek, led finance and economics coverage at The Economist, and later worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Congressional Research Service. He holds a doctorate in history from the City University of New York.

His books explain how institutions, technologies and policy choices reshape economic life. Drawing on archival research and his knowledge of trade, he builds large historical arguments from concrete details: a ship’s cargo, a port dispute, a retail law or a change in productivity. His other works include The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, An Extraordinary Time and Outside the Box.

The Box follows container shipping from the Ideal-X’s 1956 voyage through the difficult adoption of standardized containers and the resulting transformation of ports, labor and global production. It won the Society for Nautical Research’s 2007 Anderson Medal and was shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Begin with The Box. It is Levinson’s clearest demonstration of his method: taking an overlooked piece of infrastructure and showing, step by step, how it altered the geography and economics of everyday life.