Witold Rybczynski reviews three books about the transportation of cargo, including two that focus on the container ship and has this statistical nugget: When the first container ship went into use in the mid-1950s, it cost $5.83 per ton to load loose cargo on a medium-sized ship. It was done “breakbulk”, which meant each of what could tens of thousands of individual items to be carried in the ship’s hold had to be stowed by hand. Once ships were loaded with standardized containers full of cargo, the cost of loading the same ship dropped to 15.8 cents.
“This has benefited coastal regions and penalized people living inland,” writes Rybczynski. “For example, shipping a container overland from Durban, South Africa, to Masera, Lesotho — a distance of 215 miles, costs three times as much as shipping it be sea to Durban from Baltimore. It is likely that without container shipping, the economic upsurge of China would not have occurred as quickly as it did.”