Review: The Box, by Marc Levinson

[Russ Allbery]

The Box
by Marc Levinson

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Copyright: 2006, 2008
Printing:  2008
ISBN:      0-691-13640-8
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     278

The shipping container as we know it is only about 65 years old.
Shipping things in containers is obviously much older; we've been doing
that for longer than we've had ships. But the standardized metal box,
set on a rail car or loaded with hundreds of its indistinguishable
siblings into an enormous, specially-designed cargo ship, became
economically significant only recently. Today it is one of the
oft-overlooked foundations of global supply chains. The startlingly low
cost of container shipping is part of why so much of what US consumers
buy comes from Asia, and why most complex machinery is assembled in
multiple countries from parts gathered from a dizzying variety of
sources.

Marc Levinson's The Box is a history of container shipping, from its
(arguable) beginnings in the trailer bodies loaded on Pan-Atlantic
Steamship Corporation's Ideal-X in 1956 to just-in-time international
supply chains in the 2000s. It's a popular history that falls on the
academic side, with a full index and 60 pages of citations and other
notes. (Per my normal convention, those pages aren't included in the
sidebar page count.) The Box is organized mostly chronologically, but
Levinson takes extended detours into labor relations and container
standardization at the appropriate points in the timeline.

The book is very US-centric. Asian, European, and Australian shipping
is discussed mostly in relation to trade with the US, and Africa is
barely mentioned. I don't have the background to know whether this is
historically correct for container shipping or is an artifact of
Levinson's focus.

Many single-item popular histories focus on something that involves
obvious technological innovation (paint pigments) or deep cultural
resonance (salt) or at least entertaining quirkiness (punctuation
marks, resignation letters). Shipping containers are important but
simple and boring. The least interesting chapter in The Box covers
container standardization, in which a whole bunch of people had boring
meetings, wrote some things done, discovered many of the things they
wrote down were dumb, wrote more things down, met with different people
to have more meetings, published a standard that partly reflected the
fixations of that one guy who is always involved in standards
discussions, and then saw that standard be promptly ignored by the
major market players.

You may be wondering if that describes the whole book. It doesn't, but
not because of the shipping containers. The Box is interesting because
the process of economic change is interesting, and container shipping
is almost entirely about business processes rather than technology.

Levinson starts the substance of the book with a description of
shipping before standardized containers. This was the most effective,
and probably the most informative, chapter. Beyond some vague ideas
picked up via cultural osmosis, I had no idea how cargo shipping
worked. Levinson gives the reader a memorable feel for the sheer amount
of physical labor involved in loading and unloading a ship with mixed
cargo (what's called "breakbulk" cargo to distinguish it from bulk
cargo like coal or wheat that fills an entire hold). It's not just the
effort of hauling barrels, bales, or boxes with cranes or raw muscle
power, although that is significant. It's also the need to touch every
piece of cargo to move it, inventory it, warehouse it, and then load it
on a truck or train.

The idea of container shipping is widely attributed, including by
Levinson, to Malcom McLean, a trucking magnate who became obsessed with
the idea of what we now call intermodal transport: using the same
container for goods on ships, railroads, and trucks so that the
contents don't have to be unpacked and repacked at each transfer point.
Levinson uses his career as an anchor for the story, from his
acquisition of Pan-American Steamship Corporation to pursue his
original idea (backed by private equity and debt, in a very modern
twist), through his years running Sea-Land as the first successful
major container shipper, and culminating in his disastrous attempted
return to shipping by acquiring United States Lines.

I am dubious of Great Man narratives in history books, and I think
Levinson may be overselling McLean's role. Container shipping was an
obvious idea that the industry had been talking about for decades. Even
Levinson admits that, despite a few gestures at giving McLean central
credit. Everyone involved in shipping understood that cargo handling
was the most expensive and time-consuming part, and that if one could
minimize cargo handling at the docks by loading and unloading full
containers that didn't have to be opened, shipping costs would be much
lower (and profits higher). The idea wasn't the hard part. McLean was
the first person to pull it off at scale, thanks to some audacious
economic risks and a willingness to throw sharp elbows and play
politics, but it seems likely that someone else would have played that
role if McLean hadn't existed.

Container shipping didn't happen earlier because achieving that cost
savings required a huge expenditure of capital and a major disruption
of a transportation industry that wasn't interested in being disrupted.
The ships had to be remodeled and eventually replaced; manufacturing
had to change; railroad and trucking in theory had to change (in
practice, intermodal transport; McLean's obsession, didn't happen at
scale until much later); pricing had to be entirely reworked;
logistical tracking of goods had to be done much differently; and
significant amounts of extremely expensive equipment to load and unload
heavy containers had to be designed, built, and installed. McLean's
efforts proved the cost savings was real and compelling, but it still
took two decades before the shipping industry reconstructed itself
around containers.

That interim period is where this history becomes a labor story, and
that's where Levinson's biases become somewhat distracting.

In the United States, loading and unloading of cargo ships was done by
unionized longshoremen through a bizarre but complex and long-standing
system of contract hiring. The cost savings of container shipping comes
almost completely from the loss of work for longshoremen. It's a
classic replacement of labor with capital; the work done by gangs of
twenty or more longshoreman is instead done by a single crane operator
at much higher speed and efficiency. The longshoreman unions therefore
opposed containerization and launched numerous strikes and other labor
actions to delay use of containers, force continued hiring that
containers made unnecessary, or win buyouts and payoffs for current
longshoremen.

Levinson is trying to write a neutral history and occasionally shows
some sympathy for longshoremen, but they still get the Luddite
treatment in this book: the doomed reactionaries holding back progress.
Longshoremen had a vigorous and powerful union that won better working
conditions structured in ways that look absurd to outsiders, such as
requiring that ships hire twice as many men as necessary so that half
of them could get paid while not working. The unions also had a
reputation for corruption that Levinson stresses constantly, and theft
of breakbulk cargo during loading and warehousing was common. One of
the interesting selling points for containers was that lossage from
theft during shipping apparently decreased dramatically.

It's obvious that the surface demand of the longshoremen unions, that
either containers not be used or that just as many manual laborers be
hired for container shipping as for earlier breakbulk shipping, was
impossible, and that the profession as it existed in the 1950s was
doomed. But beneath those facts, and the smoke screen of Levinson's
obvious distaste for their unions, is a real question about what
society owes workers whose jobs are eliminated by major shifts in
business practices. That question of fairness becomes more pointed when
one realizes that this shift was massively subsidized by US federal and
local governments. McLean's Sea-Land benefited from direct government
funding and subsidized navy surplus ships, massive port construction in
New Jersey with public funds, and a sweetheart logistics contract from
the US military to supply troops fighting the Vietnam War that was so
generous that the return voyage was free and every container Sea-Land
picked up from Japanese ports was pure profit. The US shipping industry
was heavily government-supported, particularly in the early days when
the labor conflicts were starting.

Levinson notes all of this, but never draws the contrast between the
massive support for shipping corporations and the complete lack of
formal support for longshoremen. There are hard ethical questions about
what society owes displaced workers even in a pure capitalist industry
transformation, and this was very far from pure capitalism. The US
government bankrolled large parts of the growth of container shipping,
but the only way that longshoremen could get part of that money was
through strikes to force payouts from private shipping companies.

There are interesting questions of social and ethical history here that
would require careful disentangling of the tendency of any group to
oppose disruptive change and fairness questions of who gets government
support and who doesn't. They will have to wait for another book;
Levinson never mentions them.

There were some things about this book that annoyed me, but overall
it's a solid work of popular history and deserves its fame. Levinson's
account is easy to follow, specific without being tedious, and backed
by voluminous notes. It's not the most compelling story on its own
merits; you have to have some interest in logistics and economics to
justify reading the entire saga. But it's the sort of history that
gives one a sense of the fractal complexity of any area of human
endeavor, and I usually find those worth reading.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2023-12-20

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-691-13640-8.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>