A barge's eyeview of globalization

Container ships are designed to be blandly functional. Gigantic metal platforms, they chug along from port to port and are habitually taken for granted—until, that is, they run aground on the jagged rocks of catastrophe.

- JENNIFER SZALAI

When the pandemic arrived five years ago, Americans who were trying in vain to procure protective gear like face masks got an unwanted lesson in the intricacies of global supply chains. Today, in the wake of Trump's tariffs, including a whopping 145 percent on China, the exact locations of container ships have become a matter of grim fascination.

Over the last couple of weeks, social media users have been posting live maps of cargo traffic as if on hurricane watch.

"Normally, the physical dimension of globalization remains in the background, relatively unnoticed," Ian Kumekawa writes in his new book, Empty Vessel. A historian at Harvard, he realized that one way to make the abstract workings of the global economy more concrete would be to tether them to something you could touch. The "empty vessel" of his title is a barge made of steel that weighs 9,500 deadweight tonnes. It has served as a "floatel" for oil rig workers, a barracks for British soldiers, a jail for New York City inmates, among other things. Like Zelig, it adapted to whatever it was expected to be: "Its emptiness has been its defining characteristic."

This elegant and enlightening book is an impressive feat, especially given that its main character is, as Kumekawa admits, stubbornly uncharismatic: "a dumb pontoon without voice, personality or drive."