The Packaging of Efficiency in the Development of the Intermodal Shipping Container

Abstract

This paper addresses different forms of spatio-temporal ordering in the stowage and handling of cargo on board cargo vessels, as well as docksides. Whilst the introduction of containerisation profoundly altered the urban geographies of many large port cities, as well as devastating the communities built around maritime labour, the core argument developed in this paper concerns the incremental development of spatio-temporal ordering strategies and practices. In particular, it situates the intermodal shipping container within a trajectory reaching back to earlier forms of unitisation such as crates and pallets. In doing so the paper outlines a genealogy of packaged efficiencies, arguing that the central thread linking maritime cargo handling practices in the twentieth century is the unitisation of shape. However, it concludes that the intermodal container achieved global hegemony through the packaged systemic efficiencies of standardisation.

Key Words:

• Shipping container mobilities
• Unitisation
• Packaged efficiencies
• Standardisation
• Shape-determining systems

Notes

1. It should be noted that even with the move towards fully standardised containers the nature of packing the containers themselves means that dunnage is still utilised, albeit in the form of air-filled packaging materials. As discussed at the end of this paper, whilst the notion of packaged efficiency is used to highlight standardised practices there are still improvised practices and legacies of earlier cargo-handling procedures.

2. Early examples of containerised cargo shipments include the Link-Line service between Liverpool-Belfast, started in January 1959. This service used 12-ton capacity aluminium containers, but these were non-standard in design and used rounded top edges (“Link-Line Service Liverpool-belfast” 1959). Levinson (2006, 31) notes that a similar service was in operation in Denmark in 1951, and the Transportainer was developed by the Pittsburgh-based Dravo Corporation in 1954.

3. The phasing-out of Conex boxes for specifically military purposes in 1968 coincided with the growing dominance of the commercial shipping container.

4. In an earlier example from the eighteenth century the importation of loose tobacco from Maryland and Virginia was outlawed, and the stipulation made that all tobacco be imported in casks, chests or hogshead cases in order to reduce the potential for the smuggling of other goods inside the bundles of tobacco (Rive 1929, 558).

5. This is not to suggest that non-agreed-upon objects always lie outside of such standardised systems, rather that certain levels of improvisation are required in this case.

6. Like Pye before him Latour notes that delegation does not solely move from human to non-human. Instead it can be a process of delegation to a ‘more durable’ actor, be they human or non-human (Latour 1992, 256 n.6).