I finally finished The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Marc Levinson). It was a good read, but took me several months longer than it should have.
I feel like the level of information was slightly different from what I was looking for (lots of more detailed figures and values than my strict level of interest), and it took me a while to find my level of reading fast for the bits I was more drawn by. But it's a very interesting history of how containerised shipping came to be and the forces -- economic and otherwise -- that led it to transform the global economy writ large.
One of the striking things about it to me was that, like most stories of technology, is that it's really a story about labour rights, regulation, and politics -- and balancing those against innovation. There was some heavy industry and national protectionism around how shipping was handled (not just literal ships, but trucks and railroads also), with heavy locks on rates, jobs, and processes, in ways that directly worked against developing growth. I talked about this a bit in Nexus of unlikely forces.
(I'm not going to get into the moral or essential angles on 'growth', here. It is a concept that we tend to take as an unalloyed good, or some natural force or economic absolute, rather than the policy choice that it is. The pursuit of growth in this way is a major crucible of why The World is So Messed Up. But for the purposes of discussing this, I'm thinking internally within the system then and the system now.)
Unions and industry conferences controlled rates, jobs, and working conditions in ways that massively limited what new things were possible. They also ensured jobs and sustainable conditions [for their own industry], at least for very specific subsets of people. The story of the shipping container is really the story of the individuals and companies (Malcom Matson chief among them) that found a way to skirt those regulations and established ways of doing things enough to drive a wedge in and make the whole thing come apart at the seams.
It's not consumer-facing in the same way, but it parallels a lot of modern tech company stories, where they establish a company in illegal or loss-leading ways, build customer goodwill to the point where the old way of doing things just seems completely mad, then turn the dials as they try to actually make the business model work.
What's interesting to me, though, is the tipping point. There was a point where, to use the phrase people are so fond of using about ML models these days, 'the genie was out of the bottle'. Once the established systems and protections started to come apart, many of the unions, conferences, governments, and ports fought it tooth and nail. They were correct to be hesitant, in direction if not in magnitude, of the impact it would have on their respective concerns. But there was a definite tipping point where the ball was rolling, and those who continued resisting set themselves up to become the economic losers of the situation.
There were various ports who eventually relented and made major investments in the infrastructure needed to handle containers... only to find that the ship had, so to speak, sailed. Container shipments depended on a lower frequency of higher-volume port stops, and the early mover ports tended to be the ones around which the value accreted.
Again, I'm not trying to draw a moral stance on this. The container reshaped the entire global economy in ways that none of its proponents actually predicted either. Drawing the through-line form there to our current problems with infinite growth probably suggests that, for all the neat things it has given us, it probably wasn't the greatest move. But it's interesting to look at this story through the lens of technology and sociotechnological factors of today.
“Any change in technology,” the economist Joel Mokyr observed, “leads almost inevitably to an improvement in the welfare of some and to a deterioration in that of others.” That was as true of the container as of other technologies, but on an international scale. Containerization did not create geographical disadvantage, but it has arguably made it a more serious problem.