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

Beritzhoff of the Port of Oakland were kind enough to guide me around the port and bring my knowledge of terminal management up to date. I owe a particular debt to Jim Doig, who allowed me to use material (now in the New Jersey State Archives) that he compiled in preparing his masterful book on the Port of New York Authority, and to Les Harlander, whose files on the negotiation of container standards are the major source for chapter 7 .
    A number of people read portions of the manuscript, caught embarrassing errors, pointed me to additional sources, and provided valuable comments. I especially wish to thank Jim Doig, Joshua Freeman, Vincent Grey, Les Harlander, Thomas Kessner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Kathleen McCarthy, Bruce Nelson, and Judith Stein. The material in chapter 5 was presented to the Business History Conference, several of whose members provided insights and suggestions. Portions of chapter 5 appeared in
Business History Review
,whose anonymous referees made extremely helpful suggestions, and the referees who reviewed the manuscript for Princeton University Press did much to improve it. I would also like to thank my editors at Princeton University Press, Lauren Lepow, who did a superb job of copyediting, and Tim Sullivan, who enthusiastically shared my vision of this book and my belief that the container really did change the world.
    August 2005

Abbreviations
     
     
    The following abbreviations are used in the endnotes.
COHP
Containerization Oral History Project, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
ICC
United States Interstate Commerce Commission
ILA
International Longshoremen’s Association
ILWU
International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union
JOC
Journal of Commerce
Marad
United States Maritime Administration
NACP
National Archives at College Park, MD
NBER
National Bureau of Economic Research
NYMA
New York Municipal Archives
NYT
New York Times
OAB/NHC
Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PANYNJ
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
PNYA
Port of New York Authority
ROHP
Regional Oral History Program, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
UNCTAD
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
VVA
Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, on-line at http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/

Notes
     
     
Chapter 1
The World the Box Made
    1. Steven P. Erie,
Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development
(Stanford, 2004).
    2. Christian Broda and David E. Weinstein, “Globalization and the Gains from Variety,” Working Paper 10314, NBER, February 2004.
    3. As Jefferson Cowie shows in a definitive case study, the relocation of capital in search of lower production costs is not a new phenomenon; see
Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
(New York, 1999). The argument of this book is not that containerization initiated the geographic shift of industrial production, but rather that it greatly increased the range of goods that can be manufactured economically at a distance from where they are consumed, the distances across which those products can feasibly be shipped, the punctuality with which that movement occurs, and the ability of manufacturers to combine inputs from widely dispersed sources to make finished products.
    4. For a description of life aboard a modern containership, see Richard Pollak,
The Colombo Bay
(New York, 2004).
    5. Former U.S. Coast Guard commander Stephen E. Flynn estimated in 2004 that it takes 5 agents 3 hours to completely inspect a loaded 40- foot container, so physically inspecting every box imported through Los Angeles and Long Beach on the average day would require 270,000 man-hours. This equates to approximately 35,000 customs inspectors for those two ports alone. See the thorough discussion of ways to improve the security of container shipping in