Another very good post. I am a child of a Hamburg, Germany, family. Containers entirely transformed the port, and the culture (the booze, music and prostitution sailors' Reeperbahn). Few sailors and no time! The container also makes intermodal, i.e., ships to trains to trucks transport possible. So "ships" go inland, and we see inland "ports," moving the metal boxes, in the center of the US. And Hamburg, which was being overwhelmed by Rotterdam etc., became the port for Poland, and much of Eastern Europe . . . More generally, you're quite right that the container ship is central to globalization, which we tend to think of in high tech, digital terms. I wrote about this in City of Gold: an Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html
Tangentially related, on top of all this, the whole shipping system hangs by a thread https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-legal-revolution
Another very good post. I am a child of a Hamburg, Germany, family. Containers entirely transformed the port, and the culture (the booze, music and prostitution sailors' Reeperbahn). Few sailors and no time! The container also makes intermodal, i.e., ships to trains to trucks transport possible. So "ships" go inland, and we see inland "ports," moving the metal boxes, in the center of the US. And Hamburg, which was being overwhelmed by Rotterdam etc., became the port for Poland, and much of Eastern Europe . . . More generally, you're quite right that the container ship is central to globalization, which we tend to think of in high tech, digital terms. I wrote about this in City of Gold: an Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html