Containerisation is globalisation. Nine ways in which shipping has changed the world.1. All ships, trains, trailers and cranes for freight are built to the exact same standards. On a ship the tolerance on the rails that lock the containers in place is 1/4". It doesn't matter if it is a refrigerated container, a double-doors one or any of the 16 types of container, all are built to the same external and weight bearing parameters. It doesn't matter if it is in Egypt, Sydney or Cape Town, all the ports are built the same way. All cargo is tracked in the same way on computers.2. The heavily-protective and Marxist trade unions that fought so hard for their workers in places such as New York and London and Liverpool in the UK lost out to ports built specifically for containers that had no prior agreements with dockers (longshoremen). Rotterdam in Holland and Tilbury in England got the business.3. The merchant navy employed many men on cargo ships. 1,000 yard container ships carry a crew of between 6 and 20 from cheap, non-unionised countries such as the Philippines. 4. Smuggling of illegal items and people became much easier. Searching the boxes and barrels of a cargo ship is one thing. Searching through thousands of containers locked at point of loading and not unlocked until they reach their final destination is quite another.5. What was once a week long sojourn in port as cargo was unloaded, trucked away and new trucks and trains arrived with more cargo for loading is accomplished in 24 hours. As soon as one set of cranes has cleared an area, another crane is placing on new containers. No more people seeing the world working on cargo boats. 6. Because of economies of scale, the reduction in labour costs and the greater efficiency of shipping, freight costs have gone down enormously, so people previously unable to afford certain first-world luxuries now consider them as everyday items. Even in the remotest villages of the poorest countries where there is no national grid, just one generator inevitably there will be mobile phones.7. What is designed in one country may be made with fabric from a second, manufactured in a third and distributed in a fourth. The owner of the business might live in a fifth. Goods are manufactured where labour is cheapest. One pair of my Old Navy jeans was made in Vietnam, another identical pair in Haiti.8. It costs 70% extra to ship an empty container back to its home port. But only 10% to dump it. This has resulted in parks of rusting containers inelegant in their uselessness. There are small industries reusing these containers as homes, bars, even swimming pools and small industrial etc units. But nothing like enough to rid the world of these piled-up, ugly big boxes.9. And for this we have to thank Malcom McLean, a trucker turned genius entrepreneur with a vision for globalisation.In regions like the Caribbean with small islands, containers are broken down into small units for shipping to even smaller islands on cargo boats. Men standing on the goods 'armed' with machetes slash the polythene wrapping or cut down between boxes unloaded from the containers. This is why all four of my leather chairs came slashed making them immediately 'shabby chic' or worse. This is just part of the price one pays to live in paradise and not be fully globalised as yet. __________Notes on reading the bookThe thinking behind ships and trains etc had to change before containers could take over the freight world. Ships had to stop thinking they were in the sailing business, for instance, and begin to see themselves as freight-movers. Everything they did had to be with the idea of the best, cheapest, easiest way to handle freight and get it on it's way. Once they did that, the box container was set to change the world.... and it has.Shipping had previously been so expensive that they were best made locally even if the raw materials had to be imported. Now the material might be bought in one country, shipped to another for manufacture and to a third for sale faster and cheaper than when goods were packed in boxes and loaded and unloaded piece by piece by longshoremen. Previous to containers a ship might be in port a week loading and unloading and need a fair size crew on board. Since containers, 20 men can run a ship the length of three football pitches and it can be loaded/unloaded and on it's way within 24 hours.I knew quite a lot about shipping, partly from previous reading, but just generally. But this book is all about detail, and there are many aspects to containerisation that are interesting. Not all good - all the dockers out of work but ever since the Industrial Revolution men have been replaced by machines. Our cleverness is not necessarily the best thing for humanity but is unstoppable.