The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (2006) by Marc Levinson

Like most inhabitants of earth, I never gave much thought to intermodal shipping. It wasn’t until I served as an economic development officer in southern Afghanistan and began looking into ways we could more efficiently export the high value fruits and nuts grown locally to the lucrative markets of the Middle East that I discovered “the box”: the ubiquitous forty-foot container we’ve all seen on tractor trailer chassis, cargo ships and holding yards. On Kandahar Airfield, where I was stationed for a year, these containers were everywhere; literally thousands of them, double stacked in lines a half mile long, most serving as temporary warehouses while waiting for a way out of Afghanistan.

As director of strategy and corporate development for a leading Silicon Valley software company, I also happen to be interested in disruptive technologies and business concepts, innovations that totally remake or create industries, the type of stuff that Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen often writes about. Thus, Marc Levinson’s “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,” was the perfect book for me and, as it turned out, one of the most enjoyable, enlightening reads I’ve had all year.

In short, Levinson argues that containerization, which was introduced by the transportation pioneer Malcolm McLean in the early 1950s, did more than lower the cost of shipping. It fundamentally changed the world economy. And it did so in several ways.

First, it redefined the meaning of a port city. In the era of break bulk shipping, all-purpose cargo ships that are manually (and slowly and expensively) loaded and unloaded by longshoremen, it made sense to have manufacturing close to the docks to save on transportation costs. Once the container began to dominate shipping, the only purpose of a port was to load and unload containers as rapidly as possible using labor saving cranes. Associated industries like light manufacturing, insurance, freight forwarding and other services, once co-located with the docks, were no longer relevant to the waterfront. Such a change spelled the end of shipping as a major operation in numerous traditional port cities, from Baltimore and San Francisco to Liverpool and London. In the busiest port in the US, New York City, the massive new container facility operation across the harbor at Newark and Elizabeth wiped out the long established docks of Brooklyn and Manhattan with a suddenness that shocked politicians, labor bosses and shippers, alike.

‘The primary reason for this change is that the container turned shipping into a capital intensive industry that thrived on economies of scale, making the once sleepy shipping industry look a lot like the hyper competitive US railroads of the 1850s. In the break bulk era, dockside labor accounted for the major part of operational costs and the expense of overland transportation made numerous port city venues necessary. The economics of the container ship, requiring regular debt payments to finance their construction and only earning revenue while underway, dictated that fewer ports were visited and more cargo was loaded at each. Suddenly, small port cities like Mobile and Tampa were simply passed by, devastating the local longshoremen unions and others reliant on the shipping industry. Meanwhile, upstart ports like Oakland, Singapore and Felixstowe in the UK emerged as major container shipping terminals.

Second, it changed the geography of global manufacturing. The efficiencies of container shipping reduced transportation costs so dramatically that they no longer figured significantly influenced end user prices, whereas in the break bulk days the cost of transoceanic shipping acted as a double digit tariff on imported goods. Suddenly, it made economic sense to relocate manufacturing facilities in distant, low labor cost countries and simply ship the goods halfway around the world in container ships.

Third, the economic revolution of the container was slow in coming. The real revolution didn’t happen until the shippers (i.e. the makers of TVs, refrigerators, etc.) centralized operations and began to take advantage of container efficiencies, which also really weren’t available until deregulation opened up opportunities for big shippers to save with long term contracts and steep bulk shipping discounts. Process innovations like Toyota’s “just in time” supply chain, which gained popularity in the early 1980s, saw large corporations invest unprecedented time and energy to improve their logistics operations. Levinson writes that by the time the container dominated transoceanic shipping — over 80% of all goods traveling by container — the vast majority of cargo were not finished consumer goods but rather “intermediate goods,” parts and supplies used for final manufacturing.

Several additional themes emerge from “The Box.” One is that organized labor and government regulation, no matter how well meaning, are often the most powerful inhibiters to business innovation, which comes with an enormous price tag that is ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for inferior goods. Next, few people present at the creation ever “get” (and profit from) the full affect of sweeping change that new technologies and processes like intermodal shipping. Unions failed to appreciate its potential impact and suffered dearly because of it. It took governments decades to figure out that they shouldn’t be in the port management business and leave the extensive capital outlays to private investors. And most private sector investors were wrong about the speed at which the container would alter the economics of international shipping. RJ Reynolds foray into the business through the acquisition of McLean’s Sea Land ended in disappointment for everyone, their shareholders foremost among them. And even McLean himself, the godfather of the container and a man lionized by Levinson, got the container very wrong on several occasions, including the 1980s bankruptcy of his acquired US Lines, which sought to establish a round-the-world container transportation route. Most intriguingly, those that did profit from the revolution, such as Hong Kong-based Evergreen and Denmark-based Maersk Lines, were no early movers or bleeding edge innovators. Indeed, they didn’t get into the container shipping business until the 1970s.

As fascinating and compelling as the argument presented in “The Box” may be, it is only a hypothesis. Levinson has almost NO quantitative evidence to defend his claims. There are very few graphs and data tables in this book, although one gets the distinct impression it was not for lack of trying on Levinson’s part. “The technical problems involved in measuring shipping rates during the 1960s and 1970s are so great that reliable measures of the container’s price impact are unlikely to be developed,” he glumly concludes.

I loved this book. You may, too, if you find the basic themes interesting — innovation, globalization, and market disruption.