The revolutionary days of container shipping were over by the early 1980s. Yet, the aftereffects of the container revolution continue to reverberate. The prices of electronics, clothing, and other consumer goods tumbled as imports displaced domestic products from store shelves in Europe, Japan and North America. Low-cost products that would not be viable to trade without container shipping diffused quickly around the world.

Container shipping, it is clear, has helped some cities and countries become part of the new global supply chains, while leaving others to the side. Yet, the trade patterns that containerization has helped to create are not immutable. In the 1980s, ship lines' commitments assured the success of several late entrants to containerization, such as Busan, in Korea; Charleston, south Carolina; and Le Havre, in France. In the 1990s, they repeated the trick on a much larger scale in Asia.

By deciding where to employ their vessels, the big ship lines had to power to determine which ports succeeded and which struggled. In some cases, that choice was made of unavoidable reasons; not all ports had the depths required to handle the biggest ships. In other cases, though, ship lines joined with government officials and private port operators to change comparative advantage. Of the twenty ports handling the greatest number of containers in 2003, seven had little or no container traffic in 1990 and three of those seven had not even exited before.

These new ports, by and large, were privately managed, and in some cases privately financed. Their creation was a deliberate response to the economics of container shipping, in which keeping the ship moving is what matters most. The massive ports constructed in China, Malaysia and Thailand during the 1990s were investments in globalization. Factories whose goods use those ports will have the lowest rates and lowest costs in lost time, saving money on imported inputs and gaining a cost advantage in export markets.

A country cursed with outmoded or badly run ports is a country that faces great obstacles to finding a larger role in the world economy. If Peru were as effective at port management as Australia, the World Bank estimated, that alone would increase its foreign trade by one-quarter.

The huge increase in long distance trade that came in the container's wake was foreseen by no one. Through the 1960s, study after study projected the growth of containerization by assuming that existing import and export trends would continue, with the cargo gradually being shifted into containers. The prospect that the container would permit a worldwide economic restructuring that would vastly increase the flow of trade was not taken seriously.

“The market” got many things wrong when it came to the container, and so did “the state”.

Regulators and politicians in America, desperate to preserve a system that sought to protect shipbuilders, ship operators, truckers, and railroads, delayed reforms that could have allowed the container to reduce international shipping costs much earlier. By holding on to policies that supposedly strengthened U.S. shipping with a panoply of subsidies and restrictions meant to favor one interest group or another, they ultimately destroyed the competitiveness of the U.S.-flag fleet.

Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, container ships had grown so large that by the twenty-first century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. If a container ship ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers-enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port. If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it.

Where it will call is a serious question, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it. The answer may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling container to land.

If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe.

This article is excerpted from The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University Press). Author Marc Levinson is an economist based in New York.