Globalizing the Nation-State: The Shipping Container and American Infrastructure

This article focuses on the impact of the shipping container on the trucking and railroad infrastructures of the USA, and describes how global containerization and American transportation have mutually influenced each other. As the container moves not only over the ocean but also within national territories, its use represents a globalizing of the infrastructure, territory, and internal workings of the nation-state. The national scale, once dominant, gives way to a multiplicity of scalar relations. Yet because the container functions by using existing transportation infrastructures, it forms a network dependent on the systems and practices of the nation-state. Globalization in this case is not a top-down phenomenon whereby the global exerts its will upon other scales that can only react, but a more complex process in which a variety of scales and actors possess agency and power.