Infrastructure, the shipping container, and the globalization of American space

Abstract

The shipping container is one of the primary agents of globalization. An object that gains importance through its role in infrastructure, the container's success is due to its ability to work in preexisting national transportation systems, within the identity and space of the nation-state. But in the process those systems are globalized, as the infrastructure that once functioned at the national scale, serving the priorities of the nation-state, is now reoriented to serve international routes of trade and global agendas. The impact of the container on the American trucking and railroad systems is an example. Yet globalization is not merely a top-down phenomenon, and nations and local places have the power to affect global space and to reshape this new worldwide container infrastructure. The study of infrastructure, and more particularly the container, is especially valuable for what it reveals about these ongoing processes. This in turn helps shed light on the dynamics of our global era, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of some contemporary theories of globalization. The global, national and local are interrelated in a nuanced engagement, in which no one factor is dominant.