Transport networks

On a quay, dockers stand beside piles of sacks that a crane is lifting towards a ship. — Loading goods into the hold of a ship in Cairns, around 1921; photograph published in the newspaper The Queenslander. The Queenslander (Brisbane), Public domain, source

A simple box of cereal may have travelled in a metal crate whose doors nobody opened for the whole journey.

A good part of what a kitchen contains has travelled this way. It has become commonplace; seventy years ago it was not.

A transport network is roads, rails, rivers, ports — and above all rules that allow what leaves one end to arrive at the other. Such networks existed long before the story we are about to tell: caravans, ports of call, railways, each with its own rules. But these rules did not always agree with one another. One country’s rails did not always have the same gauge as its neighbour’s, and at the border everything had to be unloaded to be loaded again.

This page tells the story of the day when goods acquired what they had been missing: an agreement.

How a ship used to be loaded

In the 1950s, a merchant ship carried about two hundred thousand different packages. Crates, sacks, barrels, bales, arriving separately.¹

Each of these packages was taken off a lorry, carried into a warehouse, taken out again, placed on a pallet, hoisted by a crane, then stowed by hand in the hold by dockers.²

On arrival, it all started again in reverse.

A ship could spend more time at the quayside than at sea.³

A crate, and five days

On 26 April 1956, in Newark, New Jersey, fifty-eight metal crates were loaded onto a converted oil tanker, the Ideal-X.⁴

Five days later, in Houston, fifty-eight lorries came to collect them and drove off again.⁵

The man who organised the operation was Malcom McLean. He was not a shipowner: he was a road haulier. His crates were thirty-five feet long, exactly the length of American lorry trailers of the time.⁶

One calculation decided everything. Loading a ton of goods by hand cost five dollars and eighty-three cents. Loading it in containers, on this first voyage: less than sixteen cents.⁷

That is thirty-seven times cheaper.

What he invented, and what he did not

On this point, the story is often told wrongly.

McLean did not invent the crate. Containers already existed. Entire railway wagons had been taken on board ships as early as 1929. Armies had built them during the war.⁸

What did not exist was agreement between the objects.

A crate is useless if the lorry cannot carry it, if the crane cannot grip it, if the ship has no slot of its size, if the quay at the other end does not have the same crane. All of this had to be agreed in advance, everywhere, by people who do not know one another.

That is what McLean put in place: not a box but a system.⁹

An idea that recurs three times elsewhere

In this encyclopaedia, the same idea appears in four guises:

A standard weight makes it possible to compare a commodity from one city to another.
A guaranteed coin makes it possible to count instead of weighing, and therefore to trade with someone one does not know.
A written rule allows two teams that have never met to play against each other.
A crate of agreed dimensions allows a lorry, a crane and a ship that have never met to pass a load to one another without opening it.

Four times the same invention, in four different worlds: agreeing in advance on a measure, so as to be able to deal with a stranger.

It is neither a machine nor a material. It is a convention. It changes more than most machines do.

Who paid

On the day the Ideal-X left, a dockers’ union official watched it sail away. According to a witness, he said they would do better to sink that ship.

Loading a ship by hand, item by item, required many men. The container required a handful and a crane. The dockers’ unions opposed it because they knew exactly what was going to happen — and that is what happened.

Some ports took a very long time to adapt: more than a quarter of a century after the Matson company’s first container ship, the Port of San Francisco was still struggling to find a viable policy for the container.¹⁰

Not that the old trade was enviable.

A port needed many hands on some days and very few on others. As a result, dockers had to come every morning and ask for work, in a public and humiliating selection. Nobody knew the day before whether he would work the next day.¹¹

It was not a good past replaced by a bad present. It was a hard and uncertain trade, replaced by fewer trades.

And at the end of the voyage

A ship does not last for ever. It has to be taken apart, and that too has a price, paid by people we do not see.

In 2025, 321 ships were dismantled worldwide. Two hundred and fourteen of them were dismantled in South Asia, in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan — and three beaches in these countries alone received 85% of global tonnage.¹²

To measure the gap: the same year, forty-nine ships were dismantled in Turkey, and fourteen in the whole of the European Union. The method is called beaching: the ship is driven at full speed onto the beach at high tide, then cut up on the sand, with neither quay nor dry dock. The International Labour Organization regards this work as one of the most dangerous in the world.¹³

Since 2009, an organisation campaigning for reform of this sector — it therefore has a point of view, which should be borne in mind — has counted around 480 deaths and 520 injuries at work on these beaches, out of some 8,200 beached ships. There is no official count at the main site in Bangladesh; that is why the figures come from this organisation.¹⁴

A rule does exist, however. An international convention on the safe recycling of ships was adopted in 2009.¹⁵

It entered into force sixteen years later, on 26 June 2025.¹⁶

Why the delay? Because a treaty of this kind enters into force only if enough States ratify it. Here it needed fifteen States representing 40% of the world merchant fleet, and sufficient dismantling capacity. The threshold was reached only in June 2023 — when Bangladesh and Liberia joined the treaty.¹⁷

Ironically, the country where these workers died is the one whose signature made the rule applicable.

The mechanism matters too, for it explains what followed: the convention divides responsibilities between shipowners, yards and States — the flag State, the port State, the dismantling State — and it is up to each State to check that its yards comply with it. Yards have been certified as compliant — twenty-three out of thirty-one in Bangladesh.¹⁸

On 14 August 2026, nine workers died in one of these certified yards. Among them was a seventeen-year-old. They were cutting an opening in the ballast tank of a former LNG carrier; hydrogen sulphide escaped from it into the enclosed space where they were working. Six others were injured.¹⁹

Two details make this case instructive.

The first: this yard was certified, and it was already being prosecuted. One month earlier, the Bangladeshi labour administration had taken legal action against it for repeated safety failures.²⁰

The second: it was not an exception. A labour research institute recorded, between the entry into force of the convention and this accident, 84 accidents in the country’s yards: 15 dead and 81 injured. A third of them at a single establishment.²¹

One last figure raises the real question. A local organisation that has kept these records since 2014 counts three deaths in 2025 and twelve in 2026 — the year in which certification has been more widespread than ever.²²

A certification describes facilities. It does not describe what happens inside them. Impermeable floors, a drainage system and waste management are real and visible improvements; they replace neither training, nor inspection, nor the right to refuse to go down into a tank.

The rule and the measured result do not coincide. This is a fact, stated here without comment.

A question of words decides everything else: is a ship at the end of its life hazardous waste that is exported, or a commodity that is sold? Two international treaties compete for the answer. Depending on which answer is adopted, different rules apply.²³

Note 1

Break bulk is general cargo, loaded into a ship or transport mode as individual or bundled pieces, not stowed into a container, or not transported in ship-sized liquid or dry bulk loads. […] Barrels, sacks, and crates were used to haul the cargo along maritime trade routes. […] Examples of man load are bags of sugar, cotton bales, and drums of liquids.

Notteboom, Theo, Pallis, Athanasios and Rodrigue, Jean-Paul, Port Economics, Management and Policy, 2e éd., Routledge, 2026, chapitre 5.1 “Breakbulk”