About a book I just finished. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Its a history of containerization, first introduced in the late 1950s, and how it completely upset the economy of the sea transport of finished goods. Before containers, goods were loaded and unloaded from ships piece by piece, and had to go through a complicated interchange of rail and truck carriage before they could get to and from port. Afterwards, the cost of overseas shipping dropped like a rock because fewer ships, fewer ports and fewer workers were needed. Unconstrained by transport costs, manufacturers could relocate away from where labour was expensive to places like China. I know from working at Penguin, that the cost of books imported from the UK would be double what it is now, if not for this innovation. The container looks like a rudimentary sort of thing, but along with the internet it made globalization possible. For those of you reading this in Vancouver or Victoria, containerization made the Port of Vancouver the largest in Canada. I know you dont get a sense of this because the docks dont seem to be part of the city. Personally, Ive never been to them. But here is a set of figures which compares Vancouvers freight volume with that of other big Pacific ports. Other Canadian ports, Montreal and Halifax, dont even come close. Port of Vancouver = 3 million boxes. Port of Los Angeles = 8 million boxes. Port of Shanghai ( largest in the world ) = 34 million boxes.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:38:54 +0000