From Occupation to Containerization, 1945 to Early 1970s
Speaker: John P. DiMoia, Seoul National University
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Online, via Zoom. To join, register here.
Abstract: With the outbreak of the Korean War, the mechanism for conveying personal goods for American military personnel was the Transporter, and the CONEX (Container Express), a predecessor to the more recent ISO (International Organization for Standardization) shipping container. These forms of conveyance transformed port cities such as Incheon and Busan from their history as part of the Japanese empire (1910–45), and Joseon Korea.
The “success story” of the ISO container, often told as a story of European shipping, or alternatively, American trucking, remains heavily embedded within a wartime context, beginning with the period preceding American involvement in Vietnam (1965). A Los Angeles architectural firm, DMJM (Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall) helped to design plans for Vietnamese ports in the early 1960s, helping to speed the transition from French colonialism.
Break-bulk shipping, with goods handled by teams of stevedores, needed to be replaced by containerization, especially at sites such as Cam Ranh Bay, one of the major intake points for goods. As a corollary to this rapid development of logistics, the Asian subcontractors (Japan, Korea, Philippines) involved in this process borrowed and used this technology while participating in Vietnam, but also while transforming their own domestic ports.
This talks tracks primarily the Korean firm Hanjin and its use of the technology in Vietnam (Qui Nhon, Cam Ranh), along with the migration of the technology to Busan. It also recognizes that the arrival of Korean firms disrupted American reliance upon other actors, here meaning primarily the firm Lusteveco (Luzon Stevedoring Company).
About our speaker: John P. DiMoia is Professor in the Department of Korean History at Seoul National University. He is the author of Reconstructing Bodies (Stanford University Press, 2013), the forthcoming Peace and Construction (under contract, University of Hawaii Press), and one of the editors of Engineering Asia (Bloomsbury, 2018), along with Hiromi Mizuno and Aaron S Moore. Currently he is the editor of Seoul Journal of Korean Studies (Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, SNU) and has previously held fellowships / visiting affiliations with the Needham Research Institute (NRI), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Friedrich Alexander University, Heidelberg University, and UCLA.