The Globalization of American Infrastructure

This book gives an account of how the U.S. freight transportation system has been impacted and globalized since the 1950s, by the presence of the shipping container. A globally standardised object, the container carries cargo moving in international trade, and it utilises and fits within the existing transportation infrastructures of shipping, trucking and railways. In this way, it binds them together into a nearly seamless worldwide logistics network.

This process occurs not only in ocean shipping and at ports but also deep within national territories. In its dependence on existing infrastructural systems, though, the network of container movement as it pervades domestic space is shaped by the history and geography of the nation-state. This global network is not invariably imposed in a top-down manner—to a large degree, it is cobbled together out of national, regional and local systems.

The Globalization of American Infrastructure by Matthew Heins describes this in the American context, examining the freight transportation infrastructures of railways, trucking and inland waterways, and also the terminals where containers are transferred between train and truck. The book provides a detailed historical narrative, and is also theoretically informed by the contemporary literature on infrastructure and globalisation.