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By Root 961 0

the scene in the late 1960s carried far more cargo than the vessels they supplanted; even if the total amount of cargo grew, fewer voyages would be required. Shipowners wanted to keep their ships under way to recover the high construction cost, so they preferred that each voyage involve only one or two stops on either side of the ocean rather than four or five. Secondary ports would not see transatlantic ships but would get only feeder services to bigger ports. Once a port had slipped from the first rank, it would have a hard time climbing back: a less active port would have to spread the cost of building a capital-intensive container terminal across fewer ships, and its higher costs per ship would in turn drive away business. Ports that came late to the container game either would have to take huge risks in hopes of attracting tenants or would need to find a large ship line willing to help bear the costs of establishing a major new port of call.21

Some late starters did succeed in turning themselves into major containerports with relentless investment. The first containers passed through Charleston, South Carolina, in 1965, but the port had only one berth and no specialized crane to handle containers. Then, in the late 1960s, Sea-Land decided to expand its very modest Charleston operation. The state-owned port began an ambitious development program, growing from an initial fifteen-acre container terminal into three terminals covering nearly three hundred acres by the early 1980s. Charleston, with almost no container traffic in 1970, ranked eighth among continental U.S. ports by 1973 and climbed to fourth by 2000. The nearby port of Savannah, Georgia, another late starter, followed a similar trajectory after belatedly installing its first container crane in 1970. But as container shipping made the transition from the emerging technology of the early 1960s to the booming business of the early 1970s, the opportunity for ports to establish themselves as major maritime centers was diminishing rapidly. “The maintenance of a major port in every major coastal city is no longer justified,” a government report declared in the early 1970s. Such long-standing ports as Boston and San Francisco, Gulfport, Mississippi, and Richmond, California, would have to find other roles in the container age.22

The first decade of container shipping was an American affair. Ports, railroads, governments, and trade unions around the world spent those years studying the ways that containerization had shaken freight transportation in the United States. They knew that the container had killed off thousands of jobs on the docks, rendered entire ports obsolete, and fundamentally altered decisions about business location. Even so, the speed with which the container conquered global trade routes took almost everyone by surprise. Some of the world’s great port cities soon saw their ports all but disappear, while insignificant towns on little-known harbors found themselves among the great centers of maritime commerce.23

Nowhere was the transformation more tumultuous than in Britain. London and Liverpool were by far Britain’s biggest ports in the early 1960s, but their business was remarkably close to home. Exporters and importers tended to use the nearest port in order to minimize trucking costs. About 40 percent of Britain’s exports in 1964 originated within twenty-five miles of their port of export, and two-thirds of all imports traveled fewer than twenty-five miles from the port of discharge. London, a huge industrial center in its own right, and Liverpool, serving the industrial heartland in the English Midlands, each handled one-fourth of British trade, with dozens of other ports claiming small shares.24

Both the London and the Liverpool docks were run by local government agencies, which since the 1940s had walked a tightrope between improving operations and antagonizing the powerful Transport and General Workers Union; as one careful student aptly described the situation, the docks had been modernized in “a leisurely manner.” Dozens of small stevedoring