BBC Box Travels the World

For me, the most visible sign of globalization has always been the shipping container. These big, freight car like boxes, are the red blood cells of global commerce. I see hundreds of them from my office everyday as they travel a rail line hugging the Mississippi River. And then I see identical (perhaps the same?) containers labeled Maersk, Sealand, Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd, and more as I visit cities and ports around the world.

Well someone at the BBC also recognized the vital, very public role these boxes play.

"The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world," according to the BBC. "We have painted and branded a BBC container and bolted on a GPS transmitter so you can follow its progress all year round as it criss-crosses the globe. The Box will hopefully reach the US, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa and when it does BBC correspondents will be there to report on who's producing goods and who's consuming them," they add.

Learn more here. Follow The Box here. And see commentary from Foreign Policy Passport here.

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