The dockworker, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, concentrates as he stacks another shipping container onto the pile. His gaze carries the weight of intense focus. As he lifts the container off the ship and moves it onshore, he cannot make any mistakes. Rectangular steel boxes in yellow, grey, blue and red. Hundreds of them. The operation unfolds within a white-walled office, the blinds drawn to shut out any glare from the relentless Spanish sun. But the operation is not an operation. It is a training session for newly appointed crane operators in a large container port in southern Spain. Within the group of dockworkers that have qualified for this new post in the port, the younger ones are usually doing better; They have had the advantage of playing more videogames. So at least goes the talk in the white-walled office room, as the digital training programme continues to give the workers tasks and to measure the number of seconds used on each container movement. Some hundred meters away, inside the container terminal, the sounds of metal boxes lifted, moved and placed, is almost constant. A container ship, a floating carrier of materiality and value, lies at the docks. Operations are clocked.
The shipping container is capitalism compressed, coloured steel boxes designed to transport goods, long-distance and across different means of transport, cheaply and efficiently. “The history” of the intermodal shipping container has been extensively documented and analysed: This history is one technological development after the Second World War towards the complicated international agreements of a standardized box, 20 foot and 40 foot in size, dated to 1968. But “the” history of the shipping container is also a larger and dark history about wartime logistics and the shipping of arms and materials. Marc Levinson shows that containerization became the solution for the US military forces in Vietnam in the 1960s, where a rapid military buildup had caused a logistical mess. The businessman often credited with the invention of the modern shipping container, Malcolm McLean, eventually convinced the Pentagon that containerization would solve the problems, and McLean’s own company Sea-Land was in 1967 awarded a contract to provide not only ships and containers, but also terminals, trucks and chassis. In Deborah Cowen’s The deadly life of Logistics we learn how the present-day large logistics sector has been built on knowledge from military warfare, not least through logics of securitization of supply-chains. It is impossible to reflect upon this history and ignore the central role of the shipping container in today’s armed conflicts and ongoing genocide. In 2024 and 2025 we have seen dockworker boycotts and activist protests in ports such as Swedish Gothenburg and Moroccan Tangier against the shipment of military cargo and weapons to Israel, with accusation against the Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk of being complicit to the genocide on the Palestinian people.
The history of the shipping container is also the bigger history about radical transformations in international trade upon which many of the very foundations of global capitalism rest. With goods transported inside the container at low costs, and across long distances, the world map of production and labour changed with it. The shipping container is represented in popular media, in art and in philosophy as the ultimate itinerant object. Steel boxes have brought lands of labour and lands of consumption together through their movement along complex global supply chains. But our fascination with shipping containers is accompanied with an obsession with the box’s material and symbolic qualities of concealment and containment, of seemingly impenetrable walls, but still endless itinerant possibilities. What other rectangular objects can comprise both pop-up restaurants and big-scale transnational drug smuggling?
Over the past seven years I have followed what happens in and with places that become hubs of global capitalism as strategic locations along maritime trade routes. As a social anthropologist I work on the ground, with people who are much less itinerant than the boxes they move. I have followed port workers, dockworkers, port managers, shipping entrepreneurs, maritime pilots, logistics employees and others who daily perform the labour of a global port. Working with participant observation as a core method, I have sat alongside workers in logistics companies, I have participated in meetings and training sessions with dockworkers, observed their labour on the docks and had beers in local bars. Fieldwork has involved tagging along port workers as they move containers, moor ships, queue in a truck or climb a containership from the piloting vessel. It also consisted of interviewing managers, entrepreneurs and port authority representatives, and attend industry meetings and celebrations. I have had hundreds of conversations with people engaged with the port, or living next to it. In a port, the shipping container is at work on different scales simultaneously. From numbers in a digital system on computers screens inside a logistics office and abstracted codes on manual lists circulating across container terminals, to heated container walls and heavy material maneuvering.
The itinerant container also rests ashore, inside port terminals or queueing on the back of a truck. The workers that handle the boxes in the Spanish port where this text started are local men, some women, for whom the moving of boxes, on computer screens or on the docks, are sought-after jobs. The dealing with containers in the here and now, reminds more seasoned workers of the rapid changes in global cycles and how port work was a qualitatively different form of labour all the way into the 1990s. In this European port, where large-scale container traffic arrived relatively late, the sheer numbers of containers, the ongoing automatization of operations and the size of new megaships are materialized points of reference to historical change and rapid growth.
In conversations and interviews, workers remember vividly the hard, manual work of lashing cork and fish on the docks, which was what dock work consisted of. The port infrastructure was initially limited, with only a few cranes in operation. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Danish shipping giant Maersk significantly expanded the port by opening a new terminal focused on transshipment container traffic. Transshipment involves transferring containers from one vessel to another en route to their final destination. As a result, dock work shifted to focus primarily on container handling. While certain tasks, such as lashing, still demand intense manual labor, other aspects have become highly technical and increasingly automated. Loading and unloading containers requires coordinated teams—known as gangs—of 15 to 20 workers, who operate under constant pressure to maintain the fast-paced rhythm of container movements. The port evolved into a workplace offering relatively stable contracts and working conditions, bolstered by a strong union presence. However, the container port operates around the clock, and dockworkers have had to adapt their lives to 24-hour operations and irregular shiftwork.
Dockworkers equally vividly remember their amazement when a new Korean-owned semi- automated container terminal opened for operations in the port in 2010. “There were these machines that moved by themselves”, one dockworker put it in a conversation we had. Everything they thought they knew about moving containers was suddenly something else. The escalating size of arriving containerships, as Elisabeth Schober and I have written about, is often referred to by workers as gigantismo, or gigantism.
In other port locations across the globes, these histories of rapid change look very different. Many of us are familiar with the slashing of manual labour that technological advancements and the automated handling of the shipping container brought to the docks of many American and European ports. The map of global ports has changed along with the ‘container revolution’. The historically important maritime centers of the world went into decline and new ports grew in more convenient locations, and the centre of gravity moved towards the big production countries in East- and Southeast Asia.
Doing port ethnography on the ground involves simultaneously a constant historical reflection on scales, from the abstract “global” to the very concrete “local”. In a container port, the shipping container is the boundary object through which these scales are constantly read and negotiated. The container is the everyday mediating object of labour – on and off the docks. From brute materiality to abstract codes, moving way beyond the geographical limitations of the port, and between the concrete and the abstract. From computer screens in training sessions, to numbers on a list, to harsh sounds of metal. But the container is also the very symbol of change and progress. The box that keeps the port afloat, and whose arrival in sheer numbers followed by movements on and off ships is the daily articulation of local economic growth and future jobs.
Shipping containers move through the port, but also across scales that are material, social and symbolic. Containerization was crucial for globalization as we know it. It is a steel box that has moved land and labour. We, as observants and researchers, should continue to move beyond analytical games on the steel box’ openings and closures. To uncover how container shipping continues to mould labour through its itinerant mobility, pose security threats through the concealment of goods, transform landscapes through expanding logistics infrastructures, cause environmental damage, and to shape the world we inhabit.