FollowTheContainer.com is a year long visual adventure following a 40 foot freight container as it demonstrates its role as a global market game-changer.

BBC News is using a GPS-based system to follow a shipping container around the world for a year to tell the story of globalization.

The current location of the container can be seen on BBC’s interactive map.  ‘The Box’, as it has been dubbed, has received its first cargo of fine whisky.  The trip it first takes has been put to film.  The cargo will ultimately reach its customer on the docks of Shanghai.

FollowTheContainer.com, relying heavily on geographic visualization tools, historical records and contemporary images and accountings, offers a view of the magnitude of the freight container’s journey.

The book upon which this journey is based elicited the following observations.

“An engaging tale of how the shipping container helped usher in globalization”. - BusinessWeek

“Just the right blend of hard economic data and human interest”. - David K. Hurst, Strategy + Business, Summer 2006

“If all this commercial dynamism sounds thrilling, well, it is.” - The Wall Street Journal, Tim W. Ferguson

“Indeed, it is hard to imagine how world trade could have grown so fast—quintupling in the last two decades”. - Christian Caryl, Newsweek International

“Our lives have changed irrevocably because of what’s known as containerization”. - Sarah Murray, National Post

“Shipping companies that bet on containers won, and those that resisted were washed away”. – Joe Nocera, The New York Times

“Since they were developed 50 years ago, they have made possible today’s global economy”. - William Wineke, The Capital Times

“Without the container, there would be no globalization”. – The Economist, March 18, 2006