50 things that made the modern economy.

Perhaps the defining feature of the global economy is, well, exactly that.

It's global.

Toys from China, phones from South Korea, copper from chili, t-shirts from Bangladesh, wine

from New Zealand, coffee from Ethiopia, tomatoes from Spain.

Of it all know that globalization is a fundamental feature of the modern economy.

The statistics back this up.

In the early 1960s, world merchandise trade was less than 20% of world economic output.

Now it's around 50%.

Not everyone's happy about this.

There's probably no other issue where the anxieties of ordinary people are so in conflict

with a near-unanimous approval of economists.

And so controversy rages.

The arguments over trade tend to frame globalization as a policy.

Maybe even an ideology fueled by academic trade deals such as T-Tip, Trips and the TFP.

But perhaps the biggest enabler of globalization isn't a free trade agreement, but a simple

invention.

A corrugated steel box, eight feet wide, eight and a half feet high and 40 feet long,

about three metres by three metres by 13.

That's a shipping container.

To understand why this metal box has been so important, consider how a typical trade

journey looked before.

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