The container box is the key to the multimodal transport system that allows materials to be seamlessly transported across the globe, as the material basis of the dispersed production chains on which the global economy depends.This chapter examines the analogies between containerization and digitalization as two different modalities of technical standardization. It was not the container box alone, as a particular technological innovation, that created globalization. Within the field of maritime transport, the key development has been that of the “intermodal” system based on the container box, and it is these container ships that now dominate maritime trade. The chapter explores the particular, novel “affordances” offered by this technology and discusses the technology's development in the broader framework of legal, political, economic, and cultural contexts. It focuses on one of the complex forms of asynchronicity between the different “regimes of mobility” of labor and of commodities.
Containerization as Globalization
The Mobility of Commodities
Communications and Mobility ; 198-231
2017-05-30
34 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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