If you like quirky economic history, economist Mark Levinson has written a history of the shipping container, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. It's reviewed here in the Economist, where Levinson once worked. While he admits that his subject has "all the romance of a tin can," he shows how containers changed the economics of global shipping and the fate of the world's big port cities. For example, Levinson describes the container's pivotal role in Newark's rise over New York as a global port. New York's longshoremen fought the use of containers, which drastically lowered the labor costs of loading loose cargo, while Newark modernized to handle container traffic. As the review points out, "[w]ithout the container, there would be no globalisation."
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1. Posted by KipEsquire on June 15, 2006 @ 8:54 | Permalink
I don't dispute the role of longshoremen in the rise of Newark over New York, but there was also the simpler issue of space. Could you imagine huge fleets of 18-wheel tractor-trailers winding in and out of lower Manhattan, or even Brooklyn for that matter?
2. Posted by Gordon Smith on June 15, 2006 @ 11:10 | Permalink
I bought this book a couple of weeks ago, and it's on my summer reading list. Thanks for linking the review, Fred.
3. Posted by Fred Tung on June 16, 2006 @ 6:16 | Permalink
Kip, you're undoubtedly right that geography is always a factor, and I don't profess to be an expert on the geography around the port. OTOH, it seems to me that there is always some massive infrastructure/landfill project proposal for Manhattan being batted around--Westway, for instance--such that drastic transformation of the waterfront would not be inconceivable.
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