The Box - Marc Levinson [152]
Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first-century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. If a containership ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the waterline. If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port. Where it will call is a serious question, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it. The answer may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling containers to land. If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe.21
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the endnotes.
COHP Containerization Oral History Project, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
ICC United States Interstate Commerce Commission
ILA International Longshoremen’s Association
ILWU International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union
JOC Journal of Commerce
Marad United States Maritime Administration
NACP National Archives at College Park, MD
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research
NYMA New York Municipal Archives
NYT New York Times
OAB/NHC Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center, Washington, DC
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PANYNJ Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
PNYA Port of New York Authority
ROHP Regional Oral History Program, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
VVA Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, on-line at http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/
Notes
Chapter 1
The World the Box Made
1. Steven P. Erie, Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development (Stanford, 2004).
2. Christian Broda and David E. Weinstein, “Globalization and the Gains from Variety,” Working Paper 10314, NBER, February 2004.
3. As Jefferson Cowie shows in a definitive case study, the relocation of capital in search of lower production costs is not a new phenomenon; see Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York, 1999). The argument of this book is not that containerization initiated the geographic shift of industrial production, but rather that it greatly increased the range of goods that can be manufactured economically at a distance from where they are consumed, the distances across which those products can feasibly be shipped, the punctuality with which that movement occurs, and the ability of manufacturers to combine inputs from widely dispersed sources to make finished products.
4. For a description of life aboard a modern containership, see Richard Pollak, The Colombo Bay (New York, 2004).
5. Former U.S. Coast Guard commander Stephen E. Flynn estimated in 2004 that it takes 5 agents 3 hours to completely inspect a loaded 40- foot container, so physically inspecting every box imported through Los Angeles and Long Beach on the average day would require 270,000 man-hours. This equates to approximately 35,000 customs inspectors