The Box
How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
About the book
Economist Marc Levinson tells the story of the shipping container, from a refitted oil tanker that carried fifty-eight containers from Newark to Houston in April 1956 to the boom in global trade it made possible. He covers the money it took from investors and ports, years of bargaining with labor leaders Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, the negotiations over standards, and entrepreneur Malcolm McLean's success supplying US forces in Vietnam. Levinson shows how cheap shipping hurt old ports such as London and New York, lifted Oakland, and let factories move far from customers, helping Asia become the world's workshop. The book reached the shortlist for the Business Book of the Year award run by the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs.
Bill Gates said Levinson makes a good case that containerized shipping reshaped the global economy and how the world does business, and turns an unusual topic into a readable narrative.
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This book has 2 recommendations
Bill Gates (CEO/Microsoft)
You might think you don’t want to read a whole book about shipping containers. And Levinson is pretty self-aware about what an unusual topic he chose. But he makes a good case that the move to containerized shipping had an enormous impact on the global economy and changed the way the world does business. And he turns it into a very readable narrative. I won’t look at a cargo ship in quite the same way again.
Daylon Soh (Product, Growth & Design Architect)
I'm reading The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. I'm hoping it'll help me understand containerisation as a mental model to be applied to business problems, hopefully for work.
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