Author: Wessie

How Habitat Made Britain’s Middle Class

This essay was originally published by Unherd in May 2024.

An elegantly dressed woman is polishing her nails, looking into the camera with a kind of feline arrogance. Before her on the dressing table lies a beautiful pair of hairbrushes, while in the background a young man is making the bed, straightening the duvet with a dramatic flick. This photograph appeared in a 1973 catalogue by Habitat, the home furnishing shop founded by Terence Conran. It gives us a sense of the brand’s appeal during its heyday. The room is stylish but comfortable, the scene full of sexual energy. This is a modern couple, the man performing a domestic task while the woman prepares for work. The signature item is the duvet, a concept Habitat introduced to Britain, which stood for both convenience and cosmopolitan style (Conran discovered it in Sweden, and called it a “continental quilt”).

As we mark Habitat’s sixtieth birthday, all of this feels strangely current. Sexual liberation, women’s empowerment and the fashionable status of European culture are still with us. The duvet’s victory is complete: few of us sleep under blankets or eiderdowns. But most familiar is how the Habitat catalogue wove these products and themes into a picture of a desirable life. It turned the home into a stage, a setting for compelling and attractive characters. This is a species of fantasy we now call lifestyle marketing, and we are saturated with it. Today’s brands offer us prefabricated identities, linking together ideals, interests and aesthetic preferences to suggest the kind of person we could be. It was Habitat that taught Britain to think and dream in this way.

The first shop opened on London’s Fulham Road in 1964, a good moment to be reinventing the look and feel of domestic life. New materials and production methods were redefining furniture — that moulded plastic chair with metal legs we sat on at school, for instance, was first designed in 1963. After decades of depression, rationing and austerity, the British were enjoying the fruits of the post-war economic boom, discovering new and enlarged consumer appetites. The boundaries separating art from popular culture were becoming blurred, and Britain’s longstanding suspicion of modern design as lacking in warmth and comfort was giving way. Habitat combined all of these trends to create something new. It took objects with an elevated sense of style and brought them down to the level of consumerism, with aggressive marketing, a steady flow of new products and prices that freshly graduated professionals could afford.

But Habitat was not just selling brightly coloured bistro chairs and enamel coffee pots, paper lampshades and Afghan rugs. It was selling an attitude, a personality, a complete set of quirks and prejudices. Like the precocious young Baby Boomers he catered for, Conran scorned the old-fashioned, the small-minded and suburban. And he offered a seductive alternative: a life of tasteful hedonism, inspired by a more cultured world across the channel. Granted, you would never fully realise that vision, but you could at least buy a small piece of it.

No one has better understood that strand of middle Britain which thinks of itself as possessing a creative streak and an open mind. The Habitat recipe, in one form or another, still caters to it. Modern but classic, stylish but unpretentious, with a dash of the foreign: this basic approach underpins the popularity of brands from Zara Home to Muji. It has proved equally successful in Conran’s other major line of business, restaurants: see Côte, Gail’s Bakery or Carluccio’s (co-founded by Conran’s sister Priscilla). To one degree or another, these brands all try to balance a modicum of refinement with the reassurance that customers won’t feel humiliated when they examine the price tag.

Yet there was always something contradictory about this promise of good taste for the masses. In Britain, influential movements in design have been inspired by a disdain for vulgar, mass-produced goods since the Industrial Revolution. Conran liked to cite the great craftsman and designer William Morris — “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” — but Morris famously detested factory-made products. From the Thirties, proponents of modern design despaired at the twee aesthetics and parochial norms of petit-bourgeois life in the suburbs. The fashionable culture of the Swinging Sixties, Conran’s own milieu, likewise defined itself against the conventional majority. This was the era of John Lennon and the Rolling Stones after all.

In his outlook and his commercial ambitions, Conran tried to ignore such tensions: good design should be available to everyone. But they have inevitably come back to the surface. With the rise of Asian manufacturing, passable copies of classy or arty products are now as widespread as any other; think mass-produced ceramics that imitate artisanal imperfection. Similarly, successful Habitat-like brands have acquired corporate managers who force them to expand. Even an apparently exclusive institution such as Soho House, the private members’ club for wealthy creatives, is now a globe-spanning lifestyle brand with locations in dozens of cities and its own line in cosmetics, furniture and workspaces. These trends have made Conran’s vision of life appear increasingly hollow, because even in the absence of snobbery, it relied on a sense of originality, individuality and artistic inspiration. Such qualities are difficult to find when a product suddenly graces every living room and Pinterest board.

These same contradictions doomed Habitat itself. In the late-Eighties, Conran’s appetite got the better of him, and a botched effort to incorporate two other firms led to his ejection from the company. After 2000 the brand rarely made a profit, as it was passed along by a series of retail giants, including Ikea, Argos and Sainsbury’s. Like so much that was fresh and subversive in the Sixties, Habitat was absorbed by the mainstream, its lively identity reduced to a market segment and subject to the demands of accounting. Its famous shops were trimmed down to a handful of showrooms, and last year those closed as well. Today it is little more than the husk of a brand — a slightly upmarket, design-conscious Ikea — condemned to the purgatory of online retail, where every competitor has its endless thumbnail images of seemingly identical products.

A more serious problem is that, while we now have an overabundance of style, the “life” side of the equation has become increasingly sparse. The Boomers buying continental quilts were a generation on the up. They could plausibly imagine themselves moving towards the spacious and leisurely domestic life that Conran dangled before them. Most of those young professionals who entered work after 2008, by contrast, know they will never stack their French crockery in a French holiday home; they would be happy with a modestly sized apartment. So aspiration does not really capture the appeal of lifestyle consumerism for these embittered millennials. It is more a question of consolation, or escapism, or a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from the mass market where they know they belong.

Then again, it increasingly feels like the whole notion of lifestyle was a recipe for dissatisfaction to begin with. Habitat emerged at a moment when traditional roles and social expectations were melting away; in their place, it proposed the idea of life as a work of art, an exercise in self-fashioning, with commodities and experiences guiding consumers towards a particular model of themselves. Today, with all the niches and subcultures spawned by network technology, there is no shortage of such identities on offer. If you like outdoor activities, you may find a brand community that combines this with certain political views and a style of fashion. If you like high-end cars, you might dream of occupying a branded condo in Miami or Dubai.

But these lives assembled from images remain just that: a collection of images, a fiction that can never fully be inhabited. It seems the best we can do is represent them in the same way they were presented to us, as a series of vignettes on Instagram, where the world takes on a idealised quality that is eerily reminiscent of those Habitat catalogues from decades ago. One gets the impression that we are not trying to persuade others of their reality so much as ourselves.

The Sublime Hubris of Tropical Modernism

This review was originally published by Engelsberg Ideas in April 2024.

In December 1958 an All-African People’s Conference was held in Accra, capital of the newly independent Ghana. It brought together delegates from 28 African countries, many of them still European colonies. Their purpose, according to Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, was ‘planning for a final assault upon Imperialism and Colonialism’, so that African peoples could be free and united in the ‘economic and social reconstruction’ of their continent. Above the entrance of the community centre where the conference took place, there was a mural which seemed to echo Nkrumah’s sentiment. Painted by the artist Kofi Antubam, it showed four standing figures along with the slogan: ‘It is good we live together as friends and one people.’

The building was a legacy of Ghana’s own recent colonial history. During the 1940s the UK government’s Colonial Development and Welfare fund had decided to build a number of community centres in what was then the Gold Coast. Most of the funding would come from British businesses active in the region, and the spaces would provide a setting for recreation, education and local administration. The Accra Community Centre, neatly arranged around two rectangular courtyards with colonnaded walkways, was designed by the British Modernist architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Antubam’s mural calling for amity reads somewhat differently if we consider the circumstances in which it was commissioned. The United Africa Company, the main sponsor of the project, was trying to repair its public relations after its own headquarters had been torched in a protest against price fixing.

The Accra Community Centre is emblematic of the ambiguous role played by Modernist architecture in the immediate post-colonial era. Like so many ideas embraced by the elites of newly independent states, Modernism was a western, largely European doctrine, repurposed as a means of asserting freedom from European rule. ‘Tropical Modernism’, a compelling exhibition at London’s V&A, tries to document this paradoxical moment in architectural history, through an abundance of photographs, drawings, letters, models and other artefacts.

Drew and Fry are the exhibition’s main protagonists, an energetic pair of architects who struggled to implement their vision in Britain but had more success in warmer climes. In addition to the community centre in Accra, they designed numerous buildings in West Africa, most of them educational institutions in Ghana and Nigeria. In the course of this ‘African experiment’, as Architectural Review dubbed it in 1953, they developed a distinctive brand of Modernism, of which the best example is probably Ibadan University in Nigeria. It consisted of horizontal, geometric volumes, often raised on stilts, with piers running rhythmically along their facades and, most characteristically, perforated screens to guard against the sun while allowing for ventilation.

On the basis of this work, Drew and Fry were invited to work on the planning of Chandigarh, the new capital of the state of Punjab in India, which had just secured its own independence from Britain. Here they worked alongside Le Corbusier, the leading Modernist architect, on what was undoubtedly one of the most influential urban projects of the 20th century. Drew and Fry also helped to establish Tropical Architecture courses at London’s Architectural Association and MIT in Massachusetts, where many architects from post-colonial nations would receive training.

Not that those students passively accepted what they were taught. The other major theme of the exhibition concerns the ways that Indian and Ghanaian designers adopted, adapted and challenged the Modernist paradigm, and the complex political atmosphere surrounding these responses. Both Nkrumah and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, preferred bold and bombastic forms of architecture to announce their regimes’ modernising aspirations. This Le Corbusier duly provided, with his monumental capitol buildings at Chandigarh, while Nkrumah summoned Victor Adegbite back from Harvard to design Accra’s Black Star Square. In India, however, figures such as Achyut Kavinde and Raj Rewal would in the coming decades forge their own modern styles, borrowing skilfully from that country’s diverse architectural traditions. At Ghana’s own design school, KNUST, it was the African American architect J Max Bond who encouraged a similar approach to national heritage, telling students to ‘assume a broader place in society, as consolidators, innovators, propagandists, activists, as well as designers’.

As is often the case, the most interesting critique came not from an architect, but an eccentric. In Chandigarh, the highway inspector Nek Chand spent years gathering scraps of industrial and construction material, which he secretly recycled into a vast sculpture garden in the woods. His playful figures of ordinary people and animals stand as a kind of riposte to the city’s inhuman scale.

One question raised by all of this, implicitly but persistently, is how we should view the notion of Modernism as a so-called International Style. In the work of Drew, Fry and Le Corbusier it lived up to that label, though not necessarily in a good way. Certainly, these designers tried diligently to adapt their buildings to new climatic conditions and to incorporate visual motifs from local cultures. In light of these efforts, it is all the more striking that the results still resemble placeless technocratic gestures, albeit sometimes rather beautiful and ingenious ones. We could also speak of an International Style with respect to the ways that these ideas and methods spread: through evangelism, émigrés and centres of education. It’s important to emphasise, which the V&A show doesn’t, that these forms of transmission were typical of Modernism everywhere.

By the 1930s, Le Corbusier was corresponding or collaborating with architects as far afield as South Africa and Brazil (and the latter was surely the original Tropical Modernism). Likewise, a handful of European exiles, often serving as professors, played a wildly disproportionate role in taking the International Style everywhere from Britain and the US to Kenya and Israel.

If Modernism was international, its Tropical phase shows that it was not, as many of its adherents believed, a universal approach to architecture, rooted in scientific rationality. Watching footage at the exhibition of Indian women transporting wet concrete on their heads for Chandigarh’s vast pyramids of progress, one is evidently seeing ideas whose visionary appeal has far outstripped the actual conditions in the places where they were applied. As such, Modernism was at least a fitting expression of the ill-judged policies of rapid, state-led economic development that were applied across much of the post-colonial world. Their results differed, but Ghana’s fate was especially tragic. A system where three quarters of wage earners worked for the state was painfully vulnerable to a collapse in the price of its main export, cocoa, which duly came in the 1960s. Nkrumah’s regime fell to a coup in 1967, along with his ambitions of pan-African leadership and the country’s Modernist experiment. Those buildings had signified ambition and idealism, but also hubris.

Take a Seat

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in March 2024. Subscribe here. 

This week I was lucky enough to attend a symposium at the Royal College of Art, on a subject that is close to my heart – and even closer to my rear: the chair. This is one of those objects that is both extremely ordinary (are you sitting on one now?) and freighted with all kinds of social significance. Natalie Dubois of Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, a speaker at the symposium, pointed to the longstanding link between chairs and power, encoded in language. Can you secure a seat at the table? Or will you be dethroned? Who will win the most parliamentary seats? Better ask the chairman. On the other hand, these can be very intimate objects. Few images represent absence as viscerally as an empty chair.

Designers, like monarchs and emperors, have long shown a peculiar interest in chairs. Normally prestige flows towards things that are very large (buildings and monuments) or very expensive (precious materials and intricate workmanship). But to judge by the results, neither of these criteria can explain why so many prominent architects have tried to stamp their genius on the chair, from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld to Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons. Perhaps the reason is that, as the RCA’s Alon Meron suggested, a chair is not just an object but a space – an engineered structure and a sculptural negative of the human body. As such, the chair lends itself to the concentrated expression of architectural style.

To show the on-going association of chairs with power, Dubois recalled the infamous snub of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, by Turkish premier Recep Erdoğan in 2021. At a diplomatic event in Ankara, a chair was provided for Erdoğan and for Charles Michel, another EU politician, but not for von der Leyen, who was left standing awkwardly at the side. She reluctantly sat down on a couch opposite the Turkish foreign minister, an arrangement seemingly intended to humiliate. In truth though, there are few situations today when chairs possess such gravity. The old codes dictating who can sit and who must stand belong to a traditional understanding of authority and deference, one that offends the modern mind. What remains is largely a matter of body language. There are moments when sitting down uninvited feels inappropriately relaxed, like swearing or lighting a cigarette.

If sitting no longer conveys the authority it once did, it might also be because most of us do it all day. Modernity has been, among other things, a revolution in posture, as a growing portion of the population completes the journey from the fields via the factory into a chair. The symbol for bureaucratic labour has always been the desk – that is, the bureau – but these objects are symbiotically connected (you generally don’t stand at a desk). Today the chair is part of a functional apparatus that includes the table, the laptop, the human body and the coffee cup. That may sound facetious, but in the early twentieth century, when people were still needed for tasks like copying, filing and computing, significant attention was paid to the most efficient way of seating a worker. From the perspective of “scientific management,” a typist and her chair were part of a single productive mechanism. The same is true for me, except that I’m free to sit in an uncomfortable chair if I wish.

The point is that, in a sedentary world, a chair is as likely to represent confinement, boredom and inertia as power or status. We go to great lengths to ensure we escape our chairs at least occasionally, lest we develop back problems or depression. An “active lifestyle,” once an obligation for the vast majority, is the real luxury now. Then again, when I’ve finished this sentence I will probably just move to the sofa.

The Cult of Land Rover

This essay was originally published by Unherd in March 2024.

In most circumstances, finding your car submerged in mud up to the fenders is a sign that something has gone badly wrong. For the off-road enthusiasts of the Shire Land Rover Club, it is the entire point of having a car. This was one of the first things I learned at the Club’s “play day”, held at a military training area near the Hampshire-Surrey border. I’d barely arrived when I witnessed a Defender 90 being hauled out of a bog where it had almost disappeared, water rising in fountains from its furiously spinning wheels. The man who did the hauling — also in a Land Rover, of course — was James McCurrach, a management consultant and volunteer on the Club’s committee. “No one learns,” he observed cheerfully, “someone else will have a go in a minute.”

The course was a maze of muddy tracks and clearings, littered with puddles that turn out to be deep trenches of water. As more Land Rovers arrived, it became an orgy of revving engines and diesel fumes. The Club’s basic purpose, said McCurrach, is to “meet up and talk shit about Land Rovers”, but these monthly play days are for pushing the cars to their limits. “When you go out as a group, you can be a lot braver and try things you would never try on your own. Most days I’ll come home and say, ‘I didn’t think my truck could do that.’” It was clear however that this is about people as much as vehicles. There is something oddly sentimental about a day spent dragging people out of holes; it is like an elaborate friendship ritual.

I was here to find out what the Club thought about the evolution of the Land Rover brand, a story that speaks to deeper shifts in Britain over the last 70 years. These cars once represented Britain’s rural soul; they were “classless” vehicles used by farmers, landowners and the royal family. Today, they have become status symbols for a moneyed elite around the globe. The Club’s members had plenty to say about this transformation, but their own geeky obsession with Land Rovers tells another story entirely. It demonstrates the survival, in these atomised times, of an associational life based on shared interests, fun, and a kind of everyday camaraderie.

Like most great British myths, Land Rover’s origins lie in the war, or more precisely, the strict industrial rationing that followed. This was what led Maurice Wilks to design a simple aluminium-bodied working vehicle for farmers in 1947. Unstyled, bare-bones authenticity turned out to be key to Land Rover’s charm. It became a feature of the British establishment in more ways than one, a detail of country life as well as a supplier of ambulances and army trucks. In 1970, the first Range Rover — a crossover catering to both everyday and off-road use — instantly found its way into the Louvre. For Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, who drove Land Rovers from the Fifties until their deaths, the cars helped to project a sporty, down-to-earth charisma. That said, the royal fondness for the brand was clearly sincere. The queen was supposedly handy with a spanner, while Philip made the design of his hearse a morbid pet project of sorts, tinkering with it for 18 years before finally riding in it in 2022.

The legendary simplicity of these cars is also what allows associations like the Shire Land Rover Club to flourish, and there are dozens of them in the UK and elsewhere. When I asked the enthusiasts what was special about Land Rovers, they all cited the ease of repairing and customising them, as well as the availability of spare parts for doing so — a result of various models using the same specs across decades. At the play day, I saw vintage military vehicles from the Seventies as well as Frankenstein cars cobbled together from different eras. As one Club member put it, “they’re a big Lego kit for adults really. You can swap and change bits as much as you like.” Unsurprisingly, this seems to attract mechanically-minded, hands-on types: engineers, farmers, tradesmen, builders of one kind or another, small business owners in software or electronics.

The spirit of passionate amateurism, along with the Club’s “pull your mate out of a hole” ethos, creates strong bonds. Some of the members have been close friends for decades. At the play day, I met one man who had come with his partner all the way from Belgium; he told me his main reason for collecting British cars is “the community”. These seemed like the kinds of people you would want around in an emergency, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that some of them, under the leadership of a Hampshire businessman called Guy Shepherd, have repeatedly driven to Ukraine with supplies for the war effort, including medical equipment, uniforms and quad bikes. Shepherd even donated one of his own classic Land Rovers, a weapons-mounted infantry vehicle, which went straight into action on the front line. The Club likewise ran an aid convoy to Bosnia in the Nineties. It is a useful reminder that groups like this are not just for hobbyists; they can be the stuff of civil society.

But the Club’s rugged vision of Land Rover feels increasingly antiquated. Over the decades, the lure of the luxury market has reshaped the brand into something that evidently lives on smooth surfaces. Leather and wood trimmings replaced the early utilitarian interiors (the first Range Rover could be hosed-down inside), the indestructible ladder-frame chassis made way for more comfortable handling, and electronic gadgetry began to infiltrate the engineering. The cars were finding a new role in the global market, as was the company itself. After being bought by BMW in the Nineties, it was passed along to Ford and finally ended up with the Indian conglomerate Tata Motors in 2008.

In this way, Land Rover became part of a historic shift in the economy, signalled by an openness to foreign ownership of even the most traditional British companies. In the same decade that it acquired Land Rover, Tata took over Tetley Tea, the remnants of British Steel, and Jaguar, another heritage car marque. Tata’s own heritage is certainly not to be sniffed at, having been established by the great Indian industrialist, Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, in 1868. Still, it is testament to the enormous global realignment of the last 70 years that Land Rover, whose first model was being designed the year India gained its independence from Britain, is now just one small part of a globe-spanning Indian business juggernaut. In addition to its British plants in Solihull and Halewood, Land Rovers are now made in Slovakia, China, India and Brazil. Meanwhile, the UK’s dependence on Tata was illustrated by the company’s recent decision to lay-off 2,500 steelworkers at Port Talbot in Wales, as well as its commitment to fund a much-needed battery plant for electric vehicles.

What is the significance of the Land Rover’s British heritage in this context? The design writer Deyan Sudjic has compared it to “breeding rare sheep”, in the sense that such brands are careful to retain the distinctive marks of their parentage even as they are relentlessly adapted for the market. The appeal of today’s Range Rovers, typically found in affluent urban enclaves, comes partly from a nouveau riche aspiration to an older image of prestige, like a modern equivalent of commissioning a family crest. That seems to be the idea behind the new Range Rover Burford, a name invoking the Cotswolds country lifestyle favoured by celebrities and hedge fund managers, aptly described by Simon Mills as “unmuddied but filthy rich”.

But while the brand is still associated with the royal family, it is also associated with Kim Kardashian. And increasingly, it is just famous for being expensive. Whereas the first Range Rover only cost twice as much as a Ford Cortina, Britain’s most popular car at the time, the latest models are now between four and 10 times the price of a Ford Puma. An endless menu of optional extras can take them past a quarter of a million pounds — and that is before the insurance premiums, which have skyrocketed thanks to the rate at which they are stolen (though at least criminals are more likely to use their off-road capabilities).

At the Shire Land Rover Club, the consensus was that the cars had lost touch with their roots. “Land Rovers as we’re using them here today are gone,” said Adam, a carpenter and longstanding member. “It’s now a luxury product. It’s a Gucci handbag or a Chihuahua. You’re paying for the oval badge.” The crucial difference for him, and for others I spoke to, was not a decline in performance or engineering, but the loss of the vehicles’ trademark simplicity. “If I want to change the brakes in that,” he said of his own 1962 model, “it might cost me a hundred quid and take me half a day. Now you have to take it to Range Rover, and they have to plug the car into a laptop.” The same complexity makes the newer versions unsuited to the really tough conditions that the Club loves. “There’s too many sensors, too many electronics, the air suspension can fail.”

Be that as it may, we could see the UK’s luxury car brands as a story of manufacturing prowess unlocked by foreign capital. Making these vehicles requires a level of craft and sophistication that Britain rarely achieved in the early decades of Land Rover. And they are hugely desirable overseas. Just look at what happened when sanctions prevented wealthy Russians from importing them: a mysterious boom in shipments to neighbouring Azerbaijan. The problem is that, as Ruchir Sharma has pointed out with respect to Europe as a whole, luxury goods are not a promising basis for a modern economy. It is all very well for Britain to supply the world with heritage cars — or, for that matter, with public schools, London apartments and actors with plummy accents — but such artisanal products do little to address chronic issues such as low productivity and underinvestment. No longer just a car, today Land Rover is a symbol of Britain’s power as a brand, and its powerlessness as a country.

Mechanising the Oceans

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in January 2024. Subscribe here. 

I recently watched for a second time J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, a strangely riveting film with only one character, no dialogue and almost no words at all, set in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The entire plot consists of an unnamed man, played by Robert Redford, struggling to survive at sea. The sailor’s misfortune is not just that there is no civilisation on the ocean, but also, in a sense, that there is too much. Everything starts to go wrong when the man wakes to find that his boat has collided with a stray shipping container, a red steel cuboid disgorging its cargo of branded trainers as it bobs ominously across the water.

This shipping container feels symbolic, though I’m not exactly sure why. It could represent capitalism’s conquest of the globe, eradicating every frontier until even the oceans offer no escape from the rule of consumer goods. But we could equally read it the other way around. The doomed man’s boat stands for us, the coddled citizens of the modern world; afloat on a sea of complacency, we take for granted the global networks that underpin our way of life – then something breaks down, and our hidden dependencies burst into view.

Container shipping is the kind of background system that we tend not to notice until it’s disrupted. And because we are living in a time of increasing global instability, such systems are being disrupted, and noticed. I was buying coffee at the supermarket this week when the cashier ruefully observed that prices were likely to go up again, thanks to events unfolding around the Red Sea. In northern Yemen, Houthi rebels backed by Iran have been attacking the shipping of countries aligned with Israel in its current war. As a consequence, cargoes trying to access the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal face higher insurance rates, or a much longer route around the tip of Africa. Either way, the costs will be passed on to us. That’s to say nothing of the dangers of military escalation, as the United States and its allies try to protect the Red Sea lanes.

Such incidents have geopolitical importance because western voters have become accustomed to cheap imported goods, and that is in no small part thanks to the revolutionary impact of container shipping itself. As I discussed in a previous post, the adoption of this system in the 1960s and 70s killed stone dead a millennia-old tradition of human life on the oceans. It laid the foundation for the mechanisation of ports, and of the vessels themselves. It drastically cut the cost of transportation – a television can now be shipped from China to the U.S. for as little as ten cents – and thereby facilitated the rise of globalisation. Look around you: virtually all of the objects you see, and many of their parts, have crossed the ocean in a container ship.

And yet, the principles behind containerisation were so simple as to be almost banal. As the author Matt Ridley notes, it involved “no new science, no high technology, and not much new low technology.” The idea is essentially that, if everyone uses the same standardised boxes for trade, huge amounts of time and labour can be saved. Goods can be loaded at factories rather than in ports, the containers can be stacked onto ships by cranes, and the ships can grow to enormous dimensions, carrying thousands of identical containers and thereby reducing the cost for each. This is largely a question of organisation, but it also could not have happened without obsessive determination and an insane appetite for risk, qualities that came together in an American businessman called Malcolm McLean.

By the mid-1950s, as Ridley notes, foreign trade had actually been shrinking for decades as a proportion of the U.S. economy. This was when McLean sold his trucking company and, having borrowed a large sum of money, entered the shipping business. He bought two Second World War oil tankers, which the engineer Keith Tantlinger helped him convert into makeshift container ships. McLean had done his sums and thought he could reduce shipping costs from $5.83 per ton to just $0.16, a saving of over 97 percent. Still, he had to see through years of conflict with commerce authorities, dockworkers’ unions and port managers, his usual response to failure being to borrow even more money and design even bigger ships. Eventually, through stubbornness as much as anything, he brought the world around to his system. As with so many momentous innovations, the U.S. military played a role, contracting McLean to resolve its supply issues in the Vietnam War.

No less than the shipping container itself, this story is emblematic of how capitalism works. It is a framework in which the animal spirits of unusual individuals can change the world, yet it often produces inhuman efficiency and homogenisation as its end result. It ultimately consumed McLean himself: the final gamble of his career ended with bankruptcy in 1986, at which point he was $1.2 billion in debt.

The most successful revolutions are those that create a new normality and recede unnoticed into the background. This is especially true of container ships because, having displaced the older commercial fleets and needing only small crews, they now rule over an ocean world where there are few people to observe them. This eerie state of affairs is nicely illustrated in All Is Lost, as the desperate castaway floats right beside the vast hull of a container ship, unable to get anyone’s attention. But what happens at sea does not, of course, stay confined there, and trade disruptions are far from the worst way to be reminded of this.

Last month, six shipping containers fell into the Atlantic off Portugal, one of which contained millions of plastic pellets used in the food packaging industry. These rice-sized beads, easily ingested by fish, birds and other animals, are currently causing an environmental catastrophe on the Spanish coast. This comes almost exactly a year after an identical plastic spillage took place in French waters. These disasters bring hundreds of volunteers desperately trying to gather the tiny pellets from European beaches, a harrowing image of our struggle against the very systems that facilitate our lives.