UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores developments in three discrete but interconnected areas of transportation – mechanization and modernization in West Coast longshoring, motor carrier deregulation, and innovations and development in warehousing and logistics – that collectively revolutionized the movement of goods in the United States broadly. Together, these developments radically improved productivity in longshoring, compressed time spent in transportation bottlenecks, reduced transportation costs, enabled supply and demand modeling and forecasting, and reshaped the geography of movement of goods infrastructure in transportation hubs. In this way, these innovations effectively annihilated space by time. This geographic reordering is perhaps best represented in developments in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the warehouses and distribution centers in the Inland Empire. Far from deterministic, each of these three narrative strands were a series of choices mediated through social negotiation. Aside from transforming the movement of goods industry in the United States, these developments enabled a disaggregation of the production process across vast expanses of time and space which holds global implications for the perennial labor question: who works, for whom, and under what conditions.