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The Box
How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
A standardized steel box might seem an unlikely agent of economic transformation, but Marc Levinson shows how container shipping reorganized the movement of goods and helped create the infrastructure of globalization. Beginning with Malcom McLean’s 1956 experiment aboard the Ideal-X, the book follows containerization through technical disputes, labor conflict, costly port reconstruction, military logistics, international standardization, and commercial expansion. Its subject is not merely an invention but an interconnected system of ships, cranes, trucks, railways, terminals, regulations, and business practices. Levinson explains how sharply lower freight-handling costs altered the location of factories and warehouses, weakened older waterfront economies, strengthened new ports, and enabled longer supply chains. The result is both a history of modern logistics and an argument about technological change: simple devices become revolutionary only when institutions, infrastructure, invest…