The Box That Shrank the World
Before the middle of the twentieth century, most general cargo was shipped ‘break-bulk’: sacks, barrels and crates were lifted on and off ships one at a time by teams of dockworkers. A cargo vessel could spend almost as long in port as at sea, and loading a medium-sized ship might take a week or more. Labour was the largest single cost of a voyage, and theft on the quayside was a constant complaint of merchants.
The idea of packing goods into standard boxes was not new. Railways and a few shipping lines had experimented with wooden and steel containers in the early 1900s. What was missing was a system. Boxes of different sizes could not be stacked together, ships were not designed to carry them, and ports lacked cranes strong enough to lift them. As a result, early containers saved little time, because their contents still had to be unpacked by hand at the dock.
Change came in the 1950s and 1960s, when operators began building or converting ships specifically for containers and installing large cranes on the quayside. The decisive step, however, was standardisation. During the late 1960s, international agreements settled on a small number of sizes, most famously the twenty-foot box, together with standard corner fittings that allowed any crane, truck or railway wagon to lock onto any container. Without this, a container loaded in one country might have been useless in another.
The effects were dramatic. Loading times fell from days to hours, and the cost of handling cargo dropped so sharply that, for many goods, transport became a minor part of the final price. Manufacturers could now build factories far from their customers, and supply chains stretched across continents. Some economists argue that containerisation did more to expand world trade than many trade agreements of the same period, although such comparisons are difficult to prove.
Not everyone benefited. Old city-centre docks, with narrow quays and shallow water, could not accommodate the new ships, and port activity moved to large purpose-built terminals, often many miles away. Dockside communities that had depended on thousands of manual jobs saw employment collapse within a generation. The shipping industry itself became concentrated, as only the largest companies could afford ever bigger vessels.
Today the container is so ordinary that it has become almost invisible. Yet the features that made it efficient also create new difficulties. Because inspectors can open only a small fraction of the boxes passing through a port, customs authorities rely increasingly on documents and scanning equipment to check what is inside.