The Shipping Container and the Globalization of American Infrastructure.

Abstract

Over the past few decades the transportation infrastructure of the United States has been globalized by the shipping container, an object that carries vast amounts of global commerce. Best known for traveling over the ocean, the container’s ability to move in trucking and railroad infrastructures is equally crucial. As its intermodal capability allows for easy transfer between transport modes without its contents being loaded and unloaded, a container is able to follow a global trajectory through the use of multiple infrastructures. Consequently the domestic American transportation system has been integrated into the worldwide network of containerized freight movement.

The American trucking and railroad systems have moved containers since the 1920s, and larger modern containers since the 1950s. Paralleling the dramatic rise in global trade, in recent decades the container has been widely carried by these two domestic infrastructures, and has also traveled on inland waterways sporadically. Trucking and railroads have been altered in many ways by containerization, both in terms of the necessary equipment and the routes of movement. Furthermore, the container’s proliferation in the U.S. transportation network has necessitated the development of intermodal terminals, large facilities at key junctions of road and rail where containers are transferred from one transport mode to another.

Yet the U.S. national infrastructure has kept many of its longstanding characteristics, for the container does not replace or transform it but rather depends upon it. The container’s impact is substantial and results in some important changes, as American transportation systems must accommodate its physical qualities and other characteristics, but the fundamental nature of domestic infrastructure generally remains in place. In this regard containerization is typical of many processes of globalization, in that change is largely carried out within and through existing frameworks of the nation-state. The way the container impacts American transportation, therefore, is deeply affected by the historical, geographic, social and political realities of the nation and its infrastructure. Globalization is not a top-down transformation in which the worldwide scale inexorably dominates national, regional and local contexts, but rather is a nuanced and contingent process.