Another very good post. I am a child of a Hamburg, Germany, family. Containers entirely transformed the port, and the culture (the booze, music and prostitution sailors' Reeperbahn). Few sailors and no time! The container also makes intermodal, i.e., ships to trains to trucks transport possible. So "ships" go inland, and we see inland "ports," moving the metal boxes, in the center of the US. And Hamburg, which was being overwhelmed by Rotterdam etc., became the port for Poland, and much of Eastern Europe . . . More generally, you're quite right that the container ship is central to globalization, which we tend to think of in high tech, digital terms. I wrote about this in City of Gold: an Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html
This looks like a fascinating book – likewise your other books! I would love to visit Hamburg, so much incredible history there. I can imagine it has been transformed by the decline of maritime culture. I have been to Rotterdam though, the port is a truly surreal landscape, almost sublime in a way.
As is often the case, the story is more complicated. Hamburg's port was declining somewhat, in part because the city is on the Elbe, some distance from the North Sea. But the fall of the wall plus intermodal shipping opened up enormous trade with the east. Hamburg built a container port. Much of the old harbor was repurposed, lots of lofts, a fantastic new concert hall, and so forth -- sort of like SoHo and Chelsea in NYC -- so it is if anything more "maritime" if not so many longshoremen. Meanwhile, both the international tribunal for the law of the sea and airbus went in along the Elbe . . . nothing is friction free, of course, but all in all, the city is one of the winners of this great transformation.
Tangentially related, on top of all this, the whole shipping system hangs by a thread https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-legal-revolution
Another very good post. I am a child of a Hamburg, Germany, family. Containers entirely transformed the port, and the culture (the booze, music and prostitution sailors' Reeperbahn). Few sailors and no time! The container also makes intermodal, i.e., ships to trains to trucks transport possible. So "ships" go inland, and we see inland "ports," moving the metal boxes, in the center of the US. And Hamburg, which was being overwhelmed by Rotterdam etc., became the port for Poland, and much of Eastern Europe . . . More generally, you're quite right that the container ship is central to globalization, which we tend to think of in high tech, digital terms. I wrote about this in City of Gold: an Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent https://www.davidawestbrook.com/navigators-of-the-contemporary.html
This looks like a fascinating book – likewise your other books! I would love to visit Hamburg, so much incredible history there. I can imagine it has been transformed by the decline of maritime culture. I have been to Rotterdam though, the port is a truly surreal landscape, almost sublime in a way.
As is often the case, the story is more complicated. Hamburg's port was declining somewhat, in part because the city is on the Elbe, some distance from the North Sea. But the fall of the wall plus intermodal shipping opened up enormous trade with the east. Hamburg built a container port. Much of the old harbor was repurposed, lots of lofts, a fantastic new concert hall, and so forth -- sort of like SoHo and Chelsea in NYC -- so it is if anything more "maritime" if not so many longshoremen. Meanwhile, both the international tribunal for the law of the sea and airbus went in along the Elbe . . . nothing is friction free, of course, but all in all, the city is one of the winners of this great transformation.
My bad, wrong link. City of Gold is at
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/city-of-gold.html
The gull in the swimming pool, by the way, is on the side of a cliff in South Africa. Llandudno