The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson

This precision performance would have been unattainable without containerization. So long as cargo was handled one item at a time, with long delays at the docks and complicated interchanges between trucks, trains, planes, and ships, freight transportation was too unpredictable for manufacturers to take the risk that supplies from faraway places would arrive right on time. They needed to hold large stocks of components to ensure that their production lines would keep moving. The container, combined with the computer, sharply reduced that risk, opening the way to globalization. Companies can make each component, and each retail product, at the cheapest location, taking wage rates, taxes, subsidies, energy costs, and import tariffs into account, along with considerations such as transit times and security.