The box that changed Britain (and the world)

I confess. I love a good doco. And we saw a fascinating one recently, called The Box that changed Britain. Unfortunately for UK residents, it has now expired on iPlayer (I should have mentioned it earlier).

In any case, the box in question is not, as you might have expected, the idiot box that has changed our recreational patterns, language, economic expectations, cultural awareness, attention spans, visual literacy and waistlines.

No, the box that changed Britain (and the world) is the humble shipping container (technically, an "intermodal container"). Prior to the invention of this now ubiquitous stackable steel box, loading and unloading ships' cargo was constrained by human muscle power and the vicissitudes of heavily unionized industrial relations. But when a US trucking owner came up the idea of standardised containers able to be mechanically manipulated, it caused nothing less than a shipping revolution. Within decades, the number of dockworkers in the UK dropped from about 130,000 to 11,000, while the volume of cargo shipped skyrocketed. The ease, security,* flexibility and simplicity of the design dropped transport costs and speed to a fraction of their former levels and so enabled a massive increase in world trade: more than a fivefold increase in global shipping volume in the last thirty years. In turn, this displaced much primary manufacturing from the developed to the developing world and was a very significant contributor to the process of globalisation and the consumption habits of the developed world.
*One curious statistic was that prior to containerisation, over a third of whisky shipped would be "damaged" in transit. With the advent of sealed containers, this dropped to almost zero. As my scare quotes indicate, this was less about freight stability and more about security.

It was an eye-opening narrative, though I thought they could have spent less time on the effect on docklands (significant though this was in many coastal cities) and more time on the cultural effects of boosted consumerism from the massive increase in world trade, not to mention the ecological effects of displacing production from consumption. Mass shipping effectively enabled developed nations to export much of their environmental degradation. In order words, shipping containers are one of the primary reasons why most estimates of developed nations' ecological footprint is too small, since they rarely take into account the effect of all the goods purchased in the developed world but made in the developing world.
I have just realised that a book was published in 2007 called The Box that changed the World, and another one came out in 2008 called The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.