On August 16, 2006, five tugboats dragged Emma Maersk from a Danish shipyard and towed her backward to the sea. The length of four soccer fields, her keel nearly a hundred feet below her deck, Emma was far larger than any container ship ever before ordered and by far the most expensive. She was a bet on globalization: By transporting a container more cheaply than any other vessel afloat, she and her six sister ships were expected to stimulate even faster growth in international trade, lowering the cost of moving goods through the supply chains that had reshaped the global economy and turned China into the world’s workshop.

Source: Wall Street Journal October 22, 2020 16:30 UTC