Ancient & Modern: Sailing Barge Thalatta (built 1906, carrying capacity 67 tons) passes MSC Lisbon (built 2007, carrying capacity 110,697 tons) and MSC Loreto (built 2023, carrying capacity 240,000 tons) at the Port of Felixstowe on Tuesday, 30 May, 2023.
Globalisation in the shipping industry has only been a recent innovation - since the world first started using containers in the mid-1950s, and they became standardised in 1968.
Back when barges sailed commercially into the 60s and beyond, most developed countries made most of the more complex things they needed. But as containerisation spread, encouraging world-wide transport at low cost, major manufacturing industries moved to the countries which could do it cheapest.