Thinking Inside the Box: Space, World Politics and the Shipping Container Alejandro Cols, Birkbeck College

VERY EARLY DRAFT NOT FOR CITATION Technology discloses mans mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. [...] The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. Marx, Capital Vol. I, chapter 15. Isnt technology a fucking bomb? Herc to Carver, The Wire, Series II. The second season of the HBO show The Wire offers students of IR an invaluable materialist insight into the nature of space and power in contemporary world politics. From the opening episode built around a dispute over the jurisdictional custody of a floating corpse, through to the climatic scenes unmasking those responsible for the deadly human traffic inside freight containers, the spatial organisation of the globe is laid bare for the viewer, albeit from the local perspective of Baltimores less salubrious neighbourhoods. Indeed, the freight container, a six to sixty-seven cubic metre steel or aluminium box, becomes a cipher throughout this series for a whole host of local and transnational social relations marked by ethnic, gender and class cleavages. Inspired by the role of the container in The Wires drama, this paper seeks to make the metal box a protagonist in a materialist analysis of world politics today. This is partly because of the obvious fact that the container itself is a space -however reduced in scale- of capitalist globalisation. It physically embodies the transnational circulation of commodities which has been so central to the integration of the world economy over the past centuries. But following the social life of the freight container also allows us to identify a number of important spatial dynamics which are critical in the reproduction of the key structures in world politics. Foremost among these are, rather conventionally, the global economy, the national state and international institutions. The container is present in each of these social structures, not simply as a form of storage and transportation, but also as a social force with its own material power in the shaping of the international system. In what follows I focus specifically on the shipping container in relation to, respectively, technology, nature and the law. I suggest that the thinking about the box in relation to these domains helps to explain spatio-temporal processes of measurement and standardisation, production and management of global space, and the conflictive enforcement of diverse jurisdictions in world politics. All of these processes are in one way or another axiomatic to the reproduction of the modern international system. Thinking about them from inside the box arguably gives us a better handle on the complex spatial dynamics of modern world politics.

Although it is a secondary concern of this contribution, the discussion that follows is inevitably premised on a specific conception of matter, materialism and things. I adopt an historical-geographical materialist approach inspired by David Harveys seminal work, but drawing on a wider range of Marxist theorists of space and nature including Neil Smith, Alfred Schmidt and John Bellamy-Foster. Rather than delay the substantive discussion with a lengthy exposition of the difference between a historical-geographical and other, new, critical or vitalist materialisms, I shall try and incorporate relevant contrasts as the paper proceeds. By way of a headline message, however, the chief difference is the emphasis on unequal power relations and causal hierarchies however contingent present in a historical-geographical materialist understanding of the relationship between society and nature, or humans and things. The new, vibrant materialism on the other hand both rejects the distinction between the social and the natural, and is deeply sceptical about clear causal hierarchies in either of these domains the world on this view is far messier, complex and de-centred than a historical materialist emphasis on class relations would allow for. As I hope illustrate below, there is much scope for convergence between these different expressions of materialism, yet the elision of unequal distribution of power and capabilities in the world, and the historical particularity of this predicament under a global capitalist system present two major stumbling blocks in any quest to reconcile historical and the new, critical materialism. Thats efficiency, Nat Of all the spatial metaphors for the process we have come to know as globalization, the shipping container (and its more active derivation, containerization) is perhaps the most emblematic. The container Marc Levinson asserts, made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy [] This new economic geography allowed firms whose ambitions had been purely domestic to become international companies, exporting their products almost as effortlessly as selling them nearby.1 Another history of the container concurs: It is difficult to imagine any situation where the fundamental dynamics associated with the phenomenon of globalization open markets, free trade, international corporations whose manufacturing facilities are continually shifted to countries where the costs of production are better able to be constrained will not continue to prevail. To the extent that they do prevail, fleets of box boats will continue to be necessary to keep the process going and move product to market.2 Leaving aside controversies over its exact contribution to the reduction of long-distance freight costs or increased global trade, the shipping container is undoubtedly a signal feature of the contemporary world market: it is estimated that since 2009, 90 per cent of the worlds non-bulk cargo is carried on shipping containers, while according to the World Shipping Council there is currently a world-wide fleet of close to 30 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) containers, as opposed to a mere 6.5 million TEU in 1990.3

M. Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006) pp. 2-3. 2 B.J. Couhady, Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed the World, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p.240. 3 http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/containers/global-container-fleet. Downloaded 17 September 2012.

Yet even the most enthusiastic supporters of the shipping container as an agent of globalisation recognise that this freight technology was not simply the product of entrepreneurial ingenuity or the result of a natural tendency for markets to seek costeffectiveness and global economies of scale. In fact, the universalisation of the box as a cargo-carrier was a fraught and protracted process, initially propelled less by global market forces than by war abroad, political lobbying at home and class antagonisms in local waterfronts. From this more political-sociological perspective, the rise and ubiquity of the container is considered as social force with several spatio-temporal effects, two of which are worth underlining here. The first of these surrounds the issue of measurement and standardisation. One of the chief attractions of the TEU box is of course its standard yet inter-modal features. Like money, exchange value or abstract labour, the container can operate both as a universal equivalent of volume and as a very concrete cargo space, carrying the infinite variety of goods which makes market choice such a powerful element in the rhetoric of globalisation. The container thus acts as the perfect vehicle through which to flatten global social relations (or batter down Chinese walls as Marx and Engels would have it). It offers a standard measure that accelerates the subordination of space to time under capitalist globalisation. When Frank Sobotka and his union comrade Nat attend a presentation on the effects of containerisation on the Rotterdam docks, the pitch is an eminently temporal one: Gentlemen. Ladies. The future is now declares the PR suit before handing over to the promotional video: To bring goods to an exploding global economy, and to deliver those goods faster, cheaper and safer, modern robotics do much of the work ....4 Container technology, it is intimated, eliminates error, accident and inaccuracy by drastically reducing the number of manhours employed in processing the cargo. Thats efficiency, Nat chips in a fellow audience-member. But the managements PR man is immune to any irony, intentional or otherwise. His mantra is the universality of standardisation No, no, they work with all kinds of cargo, in all kinds of weather. This apparent temporal mastery over all and any geographical quirk including the weather is however, not simply the seamless triumph of a mechanical, abstract, technological materialism, but the contradictory outcome of decades of committee, subcommittee and working group meetings among sector experts aimed at securing inter-modal compatibility within and across states. Marc Levinson delivers an excellent summary of this tortuous process which started off in the late 1950s with several US government agencies (most prominently, the Maritime Administration, Marad), the largest American carriers (principally Pan-Atlantic and Matson) and private sector organisations (American Standards Association) thrashing out common standards for both container size and container construction. This process was plagued by competing government priorities, inter-firm and inter-sector rivalry, as well as by physical considerations of length, height, weight and volume. It was further compounded once the International Standards Organisation was tasked in 1961 with setting international guidelines on containers. What is striking about this convoluted, decade-long exercise is how, despite the different interests pulling in all directions, working compromises were reached by the late 1960s which in turn paved the way for
All quotations from The Wire are taken from the invaluable online transcription available at http://www.siliconvalleyfrogs.com/thewire/
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the containerisation revolution of the 70s. Finally, Levinson concludes, it was becoming possible to fill a container with freight in Kansas City with a high degree of confidence that almost any trucks, trains, ports, and ships would be able to move it smoothly all the way to Kuala Lumpur.5 The paradox here is of course that the smooth, unstriated world of transnational seaborne trade was made possible by territorially-bound national and international institutions something which well return to later. This tension raises a second spatial effect which also challenges any mechanical or abstract materialism, namely the fact that such technological transformations were premised on profoundly political, and deeply localised battles over man-hours. Docks and those who work in them have historically been at the forefront of struggles over the working day and technological innovations aimed at raising productivity in the workplace. As such, it is unsurprising that much of the history of containerisation is taken up by labour disputes surrounding the replacement of men by machines. Plainly, the container is in this sense not just a mere object of globalisation, or even an assemblage of matter intertwined with other actants, but an expression of unequal and antagonistic social relations (and the mental conceptions that flow from them). Struggles over that enclosed space, the box, are interconnected to conflicts in other spaces whether its a given Port Authority or Chinese factories churning out rubber ducks. It is, however, only recently that the narrower spatial dynamics of containerisation aside from the important, but fairly obvious issue of global relocation have been considered. For containerisation generates what Andrew Herod has called spatial sabotage: a process whereby [w]orkers may seek to restructure the spatial relations within which they live their lives as part of a strategy of resisting change and job loss.6 In a detailed analysis of the 1969 Rules on Containers agreement between employers associations and waterfront unions in the American East Coast, Herod presents a picture of an industrial landscape of the eastern US seaboard and its hinterland shaped by three contending forces. The first revolved around the 50-mile rule enshrined in the Rules, whereby only waterfront union members were entitled to stuff and strip (load and unload) any containers leaving or landing within a fiftymile radius of a North Atlantic port from New York City down to Wilmington in Delaware (this was eventually extended to include all eastern ports from Maine to Texas as well as the South Florida and West Gulf piers). As Herod suggests, the Rules produced [b]oth a space and a scale (defined by the 50-mile radius) within which it could regulated container-handling work.7 It expressed labours own spatial fix in its struggle with capital. Secondly, however, such spatial sabotage was also challenged by off-pier labour (principally truckers and warehouse workers) involved in the inland part of the commodity chain. Here, a sectoral or inter-union rivalry takes on a determinately spatial character as each set of workers literally seeks to defend its own patch. Finally, Herod underlines how the very local and highly intense struggles in the New York docks eventually delivered rules on containers which served as a template for other regional and national agreements: By forcing employers from Maine to Texas ultimately to adopt the Rules first as local contract and conditions and later as part of a national contract, the ILSA not only shaped local
Levinson, op.cit., p. 149. A. Herod, Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York and London: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 71. 7 Ibid., p. 86. Italics in original.
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labor markets in each of the 30-odd ports in which it organized dockers but also shaped the economic geography of the industry nationally.8 The upshot of these complex and contradictory social struggles and legal disputes is the articulation of the Lefebvrian triad of perceived, conceived and lived spaces. The container as a physical space appears historically as a social force with significant effects on the way in which workers (and indeed managers) experience relative and relational spaces: how they conceive and go about their everyday lives, both in and outside the workplace. The container thus becomes something which produces various socio-economic and political spaces and scales, mediating the natural and the social, the local and trans-local, the human and posthuman. In this regard, the second season of The Wire once again represents the constant reshaping of social spaces through traffic (in its broadest sense) whilst simultaneously and unsparingly highlighting the rigid segregation of those very spaces along ethnic, class, gender and even regional lines: Dragon: We've been gone so far outta Baltimore man were losing the station. Try some Philly station or some shit like that. Bodie: What the radio in Philly is different? Dragon: Please. Youve gotta be fucking with me right? You aint never heard of radio station outside of Baltimore?" Bodie: No man I aint never left Baltimore except that boy village shit, one day, and I wasnt trying to get no radio [] Why would anyone want to leave Baltimore man, thats what Im asking? Im Also Talking About the Canal That containers produce space on various geographical scales may not be so controversial among materialist IR scholars. But the claim that containers also produce nature is perhaps more contentious. I want to suggest in this next section drawing on the theoretical work of the late Neil Smith and the illustration of Arctic thawing that this is exactly what containers do. Or more precisely, that considering the role of containerisation as one of the major drivers behind year-round navigation of the Arctic Ocean discloses [our] mode of dealing with nature. The gradual disappearance of the Arctic ice sheets has of course been one of the chief indicators of our planets wider environmental crisis. One recent study suggests that Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 18 per cent since 2007 the year that witnessed the planting of the Russian flag on the Lomonosov Ridge below the North Pole and the opening of the Northwest Passage to ice-free navigation.9 Both these events are symptomatic of what has been labelled the Geopolitics of Arctic Melt: a situation where [m]elting Arctic ice transforms the region from one of primarily scientific and environmental concerns into a maelstrom of competing commercial, national security

Ibid., p. 99. Arctic ice shrinks 18% against record, sounding climate change alarm bells The Guardian, 19 September, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/19/arctic-ice-shrinks. Downloaded 26/09/12. See also, Scott G. Borgerson, Arctic Meltdown: The Economic and Security Implications of Global Warming Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No.2, April 2008, pp. 63-77.
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and environmental concerns .10 The implication of this shift from primarily scientific to geopolitical conceptions of the Arctic is that these are quite recent developments, marking a transformation of the Arctic from a natural to a sociopolitical domain. The Arctic on this account appears as a fairly undifferentiated and unblemished natural space which has only lately become the object of socio-economic and political intrusion. Yet as Klaus Dodds and other critical-geopolitical scholars have shown, the Arctic is like other seemingly remote and exceptional regions of the globe a space produced relationally [f]rom relationships between human actors and their networks [] It is not climate change and Arctic exceptionalism that produce geopolitical interventions, it is the identification of climate change as a security issue, and subsequent identification of the Arctic as a space of exception, that enable geopolitical intervention .11 Such geopolitical interventions are, furthermore, part of a longer trajectory of socio-natural relations in this region from successive human settlements to the twentieth-century explorations - which need to be factored into any consideration of the contemporary production of Arctic space. From an historical-materialist perspective, the key to understanding these trajectories is to frame them within specific sets of social relations. On this reading, different modes of production most notably capitalism are accompanied by distinctive social metabolisms with nature, which in turn generate unique spatial logics and dynamics. Neil Smith is one of a number of Marxist thinkers who tried to theorise this complex relationship between society and nature at various ontological, epistemological and practical levels. In essence, Smith adopts Hegels distinction between a first (given) and a second (produced) nature and moors it to the Marxian differentiation between use- and exchange value. Thus, the distinctiveness of nature under capitalism is a drive toward a unity between these two natures. It is Smith avers, certainly a materialist unity but it is not the physical or biological unity of the natural scientist. Rather it is a social unity centred on the production process.12 Nature becomes increasingly socialised, so to speak, without thereby losing all of its natural, material properties: The same piece of matter exists, simultaneously in both natures: as physical commodity subject to the laws of gravity and physics it exists in the first nature, but as exchange-value subject to the laws of the market, it travels in the second nature. Human labor produced the first nature, human relations produces the second.13 In the case of the Arctic region, socio-natural relations have been marked by an intensified capitalist valorisation of nature. Consonant with other frontierland experiences, the Arctic has been presented as a wilderness which needs to be tamed and enclosed in order to command and exploit its enormous untapped resources. The melting of the Arctic sea ice - itself of course a product of human-induced global warming has, to be sure, transformed the environmental conditions for the capitalist appropriation of nature in that area. But, paraphrasing the earlier quotation from Dodds and his colleagues, it is not global warming and Arctic melt that produce the
Charles K. Ebinger and E. Zambetakis, The Geopolitics of Arctic Melt International Affairs, Vol. 85, No.6, 2009, pp. 1215-1232, p. 1215. 11 Klaus Dodds et al. Have You Heard the One About the Disappearing Ice?: Recasting Arctic Geopolitics Political Geography, Vol. 30, No.1, 2011, pp. 202-214, p. 203. 12 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 389. 13 Ibid., p. 389.
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valorisation of the region, but the capitalist quest for value and the identification of the Arctic as a resource-rich space that renders it as a new frontier of capital accumulation. But what has the container to do in all this? Two things, at least. First and perhaps most obviously, the container - as a cargo technology aimed at reducing the cost of long-distance trade stands to offer, and therefore make, considerable gains from the year-round opening of Arctic sea-lanes. A permanently navigable Northwest Passage (through North America) or Northern Sea Route (over Eurasia) could shave whole days off existing shipping routes from East Asia to Europe and North America, thereby also avoiding unstable and often perilous chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden or the Malacca Strait. On some estimates, these shortcuts could cut the cost of a single voyage by a large container ship by as much as 20 per cent from approximately $17.5 million to $14million saving the shipping industry billions of dollars a year.14 True, these reductions are predicated on a number of interconnected uncertainties global energy prices, access to Arctic hydrocarbons, building of new ice-capable shipping fleets, the continuation of changing weather patterns and so on.15 Yet the continued private and public investment into Arctic prospecting, broadly conceived, suggests a strategic commitment to exploiting those potential sea-lanes. The causal connections between containerisation and the opening of circumpolar routes to all-year shipping are, appropriately, complex. But in the same way that the holds of Atlantic slave ships came to embody the power of mercantile empires, the container can be said to crystallise the imperialism of free trade. Both forms of commerce are premised on intercontinental shipping: while first generated wealth by forcibly and violently transporting human cargo from one market to the other, the second creates wealth by distributing things manufactured by ostensibly free labour in one economy to another. Whereas the slave ship was about controlling people in order to exploit territory, the container ship is about controlling territory in order to exploit people. This last argument brings us to the second, more indirect manner in which the container contributes to the appropriation of Arctic nature, and that is through claims to territorial sovereignty by Arctic states. The aforementioned Russian submission to the UN Commission on the Limits to the Continental Shelf (CLCS), claiming that Moscow had sovereign rights over the natural resources of part of the Arctic seabed is the most commonly cited example of this process of re-territorialisation. But it is perhaps Canadas contested jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage which is most paradigmatic of the tensions between free trade and state sovereignty encapsulated in the container. Ottawa has historically considered the Northwest Passage as part of Canadas internal waters, but other states - especially the USA - have claimed the Passage constitutes an international waterway open to innocent passage for ships of all flags. Canada has in part defended its sovereignty over these Arctic waters by suggesting that, since they are frozen for much of the year, they constitute extensions of the countrys landmass. With the prospect of an ice-free sea-lane in the coming decades, Canadian sovereignty over these waters will be compromised.

14 15

Borgerson, op.cit., p.70. Ebinger & Zambekatis, op. cit.

The conventional resolution of such disputes generally involves one of two routes: international law or the unilateral assertion of national sovereignty. The problem with the first is that reference to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has generally lead to procrastination and fudging when it comes to disputes over territorial waters. Moreover, Washington is not a signatory to UNCLOS and so in the specific case of the status of the Northwest Passage, the competing US and Canadian claims are managed through the 1988 bilateral Arctic Co-Operation Agreement which in essence guarantees Canadian agreement to passage by American vessels so long as consent is requested first. The prospect of an ice-free Passage, however, has made the second option unlilateral territorial assertion a more urgent one. The principle of use it, or lose it loudly proclaimed by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2007, prompted the re-territorialisation of Canadas Arctic regions through investment in offshore patrols, a deep-sea port and the upgrading of existing military installations in Canadas North. Plainly, these efforts at effective occupation of open spaces can be read as part of a wider performance of Arctic geopolitics where, The regions coding a s a feminine space to be tamed by masculine exploits provides an arena for national magnification.16 Yet, from a materialist perspective, the commercial imperatives driving such magnification are inescapable. In defending our nations sovereignty Stephen Harper declared in 2007 nothing is as fundamental as protecting Canadas territorial integrity; our borders, our airspace and our waters. More and more, as global commerce routes chart a path to Canadas North and as the oil, gas and minerals of this frontier become more valuable, northern resource development will grow ever more critical to our country.17 The production of space through the appropriation of nature in the case of the contemporary Arctic is inextricably associated to the container as a technology which drives the cost-cutting quest for faster intercontinental sea-lanes. Nature on this account is no longer an alien, external force; nor is it, as in some other materialist perspectives an unpredictable, de-centered and unfathomably complex assemblage. It is instead a powerful but subordinated socio-economic and political force, subject to manipulation for the purposes of value-creation. Frank Sebotka understands this material power of waterways when he puts it to his lobbyist Brucie, that the space that needs to be produced is not a pier but a canal: I'm operating under the assumption that because of your relentless diligence, the funding for the grain pier is gonna pass the Assembly. But I'm also talking about the canal, so you're gonna talk about the canal, so the Muldoons who run the old line state, they're gonna talk about he canal 'til someday, someway, that motherfucker gets dredged and we get some ships in here. Morning Tides and Wind Currents The intermodal character of the container is generally seen as one of the major reasons behind its success as a freight technology. The sectors pioneering firm was called Sea-Land Services for a reason: it promised the smooth transit from truck to ship (and vice-versa), thereby shrinking distance and reducing cost. This was, for many, a signal moment in the annihilation of space by time; containerization had
Dodds et al., Have You Heard, p. 205. Prime Minister of Canadas Office, Primer Minister Stephen Harper Announces new offshore Patrol Ships http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1742. Downloaded 2 October 2012.
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become the material expression of globalization. Yet as we have already seen, this is at best, only half the story. For the terraqueous nature of our planet has doggedly resisted the universal flattening of the earth through the power of a metal box. The high seas do act as the ultimate free trade area, serving as highways for the cherished flow of commodities across an open, global economy (as well as harbouring some of the worst employment practices and operating one of the most opaque corporate governance systems). But this outlaw sea is no good onshore: as stated earlier, one of the features of a properly capitalist, free trade imperialism is its reliance on spatial fixes ie. control over territory in order to better exploit workers. Capitalist corporations including shipping and container firms rely on dependable territorial jurisdictions to secure the realization of value by, inter alia, enforcing contract law, offering the requisite ancillary services (insurance, banking, legal services, IT support and so on) and securing a working transport and communications infrastructure. The paradox, for our purposes, is this: a form of social reproduction inherently based around circulation, flows and mobility simultaneously demands the regulation and control of such movement, generally through the enforcement of a territorial jurisdiction. Reviel Netz has put the point eloquently, using the example of railways: [t]he prevention of motion is in some sense more fundamental than the facilitation of motion. A train is worthless unless you can prevent some people- those who did no purchase a ticket from boarding it. Like all property, a train becomes valuable only when access to it can be controlled, and so the system of the railroad lines that connects points - is anchored in a system of stations, buildings whose walled lines enclose space and control motion. A world where the railroad exists without the station is unthinkable, because without control over motion, value cannot be formed. Value arises from lines of division even when they happen to enclose lines of connection. To understand history and its motions, then, we must first understand the history of the prevention of motion.18 These insights could equally be applied to the maritime world and the complex interaction between sea and land in the configuration of global politics. Here, it is the views of Alfred Thayer Mahan on the sea as a great highway and a wide common that continue to characterize capitalist geopolitics. Writing toward the end of the nineteenth century Mahan advocated a blue-water strategy for the USA, emphasising the control of key sea-lanes and maritime chokepoints in the administration of global hegemony. In these three things [production, shipping, and colonies] is to be found the key to much of the history, as well as of the policy, of nations bordering the sea. Mahan suggested, continuing further that the history of the seaboard nations has been less determined by the shrewdness and foresight of governments than by conditions of position, extent, number and character of their people by what are called, in a word, natural conditions.19 Nuclear weapons and airpower notwithstanding, American imperialism is still built on its dominance of the global commons. The container, as just noted, is one conduit for the command of that wide common, so long as this is accompanied by the jurisdiction over coastlines. And it is here that, once again, the box generates spatial effects at various socioeconomic and political scales.

R. Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University Press 2009, p. xii. 19 A.T. Mahan, The Role of the Sea in History, 1889.

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Perhaps the most suggestive instance of such spatial effects is the creation and management of public authority in and among major containerports. In the second series of The Wire, the floating corpse discovered by McNulty becomes the tragic marker of contiguous and competing jurisdictions McNulty engineers the ebb and flow of harbour waters to locate the dumping of the dead body beyond the county line into Baltimore Police territory. Sergeant! Your floater's come back, Rawls informs Landsman, County boards are puttin' her on our side of the bridge. No fuckin' way replies Landsman Yeah, some useless fuck in our marine unit faxed 'em a report on the early morning tides and wind currents. Shows the body went into the water west of the bridge and drifted out. The ambition of modern political authority is to regulate and manage those very morning tides and wind currents to somehow territorialise those flows and contain them into exclusive jurisdictions. But the shape adopted by such public agencies varies significantly. Consider the case of the Port of New York Authority (today known as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - PANYNJ). Founded in 1921, the Port Authority and its accompanying 1500 square mile District - including New York, Newark and Jersey cities, as well as 300 other smaller surrounding towns and cities - essentially geared toward (literally) bridging the Hudson River, thereby connecting New Yorks international commercial hubs to those in New Jersey and beyond. The story of this Port Authority is, predictably, a long and complex one, involving rivalry and cooperation among enterprising engineers, political brokers, local government officials and businessmen.20 For our purposes, the most relevant point is that out of this bi-state Authority there emerged, especially after World War II, a form of municipal corporation that superimposes a parallel economic geography onto the political division along state- and city-lines. The PANYNJ thus not only has responsibilities for the management and development of the regions major transport and communications networks, it also enjoys indirect revenue raising and lawenforcement powers akin to that of a state. Once again, the container has played more than a walk-on role in this production of regional space. The career of the modern container was indeed launched in April 1956 from the Authoritys Newark piers, and the worlds first containerport at Elizabeth, NJ was built by the Authority. But it has since then conditioned the regions development as the District competes with other national and international commercial hubs. New York City has survived as one of the worlds largest international gateways, but this has been at the expense of its manufacturing prowess. The container, Levinson succinctly puts it, turned the economics of location on its head. [By the 1970s] a company could replace its crowded, multistory plant in Brooklyn or Manhattan with a modern, single-story factory in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, could enjoy lower taxes and electricity costs at its new home, and could send a container of goods to Port Elizabeth for a fraction of the cost of a plant in Manhattan or Brooklyn. This is exactly what occurred: while industry fled the city, 83 percent of the manufacturing jobs that left New York between 1961 and 1976 ended up no further away than Pennsylvania, upstate New York, or Connecticut.21
Told in great detail by James W. Doig in his Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001) 21 Levinson, The Box, p. 99.
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Far from being a purely economic or pragmatic decision driven by market forces, the relocation of manufacturing from New York City to its hinterlands was the product of specific decisions taken by a named political authority, the PANYNJ. The container was on this account neither a merely passive product of inevitable economic change, nor a technological driver of such transformation: it embodied the political agency aimed at re-orienting and re-scaling the NewYork-New Jersey region from a national manufacturing center into a global commercial and transport hub. Mahans natural conditions of the seaboard nation have certainly been exploited by the PANYNJ in pursuing a larger share of global oceanic trade. But such a blue water strategy has always operated in conjunction with land-based economic infrastructures such as railways and motorways, as well as territorial political agencies like the PANYNJ.22 In this respect, the container acts as a material force that is simultaneously an object of Rawls morning tides and wind currents as it is a subject of an organization of space that delineates a Port Authority jurisdiction from that of the City. Imagine February on the Docks In their recent compilation of essays on new materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost urge us to conceive of matter as possessing its own modes of selftransformation, self-organization and directness, and thus no longer passsive or inert. They encourage social theorists to encompass the vital power of things and to recognise that the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened.23 Ive suggested in this essay that the container manifests precisely these agentic capacities in regard to world politics, but that in order to register its power we need to look at the world from the perspective of a longshoreman like Frank Sobotka to look inside the box. For in the fifth episode of the second series of The Wire, as Bunk and Beadie Russell follow a lead regarding the computer system on the waterfront, Sobotka discloses his mode for dealing with nature. Information technology appears here, as managers like it, to master nature in a neutral, measureable and efficient way. But Sobotka knows better he appreciates how information technologies can both manipualte and be manipulated by nature (including men).
In both NY-NJ and L.A.-LB, railroad service has been a critical component in the expansion of container service and therefore in the ability of these regions to maintain viable ports, with their impact on economic development in the wider regions. In the New York area, as described earlier, rail access to the piers was an important factor in the debates surrounding the creation of the Port Authority. It was also crucial in the ability of the Port agency in recent decades to expand the reach of its container service beyond local markets. Trucks delivered containers from customers within 200-300 miles of the port; but the railroad network extended across the country and reached important mid-western markets essential to the ports continued growth. By the 1980s, the freight rail lines were a major factor in gathering and distributing freight in containers across the country. Rehabilitated rail lines ran within a few miles of the Newark and Elizabeth piers; and the PA had to invest in rehabilitating decrepit local links to the piers. Steven P. Erie et al. Americas Leading International Trade Centers and Their Entrepreneurial Agencies: Challenges and Strategies in the New York and Los Angeles Regions in David Halle and Andrew Beveridge (eds) New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University press, 2010), p.10.
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Bunk: He was sayin' that the computer makes it hard to steal off the docks. Sobotka: Did our illustrious port manager tell you that right now, we got 160 boxes missing off the Patapsco terminal alone? Or the last time we inventoried the truck chassis, we came up 300 light? No, I suppose not, that's management for ya. Bunk: 160, huh? Sobotka: Not that all of them are stolen. 'Cause you can lose a can by accident, no problem. For one thing, these handhelds use radio waves. And with all the equipment and container stacks out there, sometimes them waves get knocked down. That happens, a can don't get entered. Or, just as easy, a checker makes the wrong entry. Either 'cause he's lazy, he's sloppy, or he's still shitfaced from the night before. Or, simpler than that, you got fat fingers, no offense, so imagine February on the docks. You're wearing Gortex gloves, tryin' to punch numbers on that thing. Russell: You're sayin' that's what happened to the can with the girls in it? Sobotka: Beadie, darlin', I don't know what happened there. I'm just sayin' if you go by the computer, it might look like there's some kinda dirt goin' down, when it's really just a glitch in the system. Bunk: The customs seal was broke on that box. Shouldn't that get noticed? Sobotka: You're off-loading a ship the size of a small town, you might notice a broke seal, you might not. Look, you wanna keep pullin' our chain, you can. But it ain't like it's just that one box that went missing. We lose them son-bitches all the time. Bunks conclusion over this exchange is also incisive They're playing us he tells Beadie on leaving the docks. Clearly, hes referring to Sobotka and his accomplices, but the container is also a protagonist in this game. As Ive tried to indicate with reference to various pressing issues in world politics, the box generates diverse spatial effects on different scales. Materialist approaches to international relations offer a better grasp of these spatial effects as they encompass not just narrowly intersubjective relations, but the interaction or social metabolism - between human subjects and our natural environment, including of course things and matter. But the materialism I have been deploying is a historical-geographical materialism. One that acknowledges the emergent powers, vital forces and circulating affect of persons, things and matter, yet also emphasises the causal hierarchies and asymmetrical relations that issue from such interactions. Complex processes like Arctic thaw or the production of regions are punctuated by structural transformations and governed by unequal power relations among different social and natural agents: complex feedback loops certainly deliver contingent and unexpected effects, but these are always conditioned by powerful interests and forces, principally driven by the capitalist valorisation of nature. Contingency after all presupposes a structure. Like Bunk and Sobotka, a historical-geographical materialism recognises that human and nonhuman forces play an interactive role in social life that cans get lost because sometimes the waves get knocked down or because fat fingers and Gortex gloves get in the way of efficiently shifting boxes in North Atlantic winter. Its a materialism which simply insists that the rules of the game are shaped by changing balance of forces and sharp inequalities of power which no matter the season or the technology employed are stacked in favour of those already privileged.