The New York Times Book Review - Beth Macy
…accessible, cogent, occasionally riveting and thoroughly new. The history of large factories, as Freeman outlines it, is the history of the modern world and most everything we see, experience and touch. At a time when the ghost of the American dream hovers over headlines ranging from free trade vs. protectionism to opioid addiction and other so-called diseases of despair, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World should be required reading for all Americans…
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
Joshua B. Freeman's rich and ambitious Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination. Behemoth is more than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements. Freeman…traces the rise of the factory and how it became entwined with Enlightenment ideas of progress—"the notion that through human effort and rationality the world could be transformed toward greater abundance, well-being and moral order"…Freeman handles all of this material with the seriousness it deserves. If Behemoth can feel a little slow-going at times, that's partly because of the knottiness of the history Freeman lays out, as well as his honorable refusal to resort to simplistic notions of grand progress or portentous doom…Behemoth doesn't romanticize the earlier incarnations of gigantic factories, but Freeman understands why some people did—and still do.
Publishers Weekly
★ 12/04/2017
Freeman (American Empire), professor of history at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, recounts the development of the factory, which over the past 300 years has come to symbolize both utopian possibilities and appalling realities. He notes that “we live in a factory-made world,” yet most consumers know little about these places or the experiences of those who work in them. Freeman begins in 18th-century England with the first factories, which were synonymous with filth and misery—William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” He moves to 19th-century New England, where paternal industrialists hoped that they could both reap large profits and provide their employees with excellent working conditions; their idealism was soon replaced by a drive for ever-greater profits. Freeman is sharply critical of the technocrats and managers who regularly attempt to reduce wages and increase control over labor, yet he also sees the factory as a workplace that holds the possibility of liberation; Ford auto workers’ successful unionizing efforts, for example, “gave mass production a new, more democratic meaning.” Freeman goes on to describe modern Chinese factories, noting that some have become notorious for conditions that have caused workers to commit suicide, while others offer lavish recreational amenities that are irresistible to rural migrants. This wide-ranging book offers readers an excellent foundation for understanding how their possessions are made, as well as how the factory system affects society. (Feb.)
Newsday
"A global tour of three centuries, from English textile mills to Detroit steel plants to Chinese iPhone factories."
Pacific Standard
"Freeman uses the history of the factory as a way to re-examine how workers are treated worldwide."
New Republic - David Sessions
"An effortless and engaging guide."
Newsday - Tom Beer
"A global tour of three centuries, from English textile mills to Detroit steel plants to Chinese iPhone factories."
Pacific Standard - Bradley Babendir
"Freeman uses the history of the factory as a way to re-examine how workers are treated worldwide."
Wall Street Journal - Jonathan Rose
"You may have no detailed knowledge of factories except that they can be converted into cool lofts. In that case, you’ll learn much from historian Joshua Freeman."
National Book Review
"Excellent."
Bookpage
"Fascinating. . . . A compulsively readable cultural history of the birth and development of factories and their impact on society."
Slate - Henry Grabar
"[An] immersive, trivia-packed history."
Guardian - Ian Jack
"Freeman has written a superb account.… Almost every page contains a memorable fact or an intriguing thought."
New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
"Rich and ambitious. . . . More than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements, Behemoth depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination."
Economist
"[A] lively chronicle of the factory.… [Freeman] delves into the nitty-gritty of manufacturing. He successfully melds together those nuggets with social history, on the shop floor and beyond the factory walls."
Scott W. Berg
"Fascinating. . . Freeman shows how factories have had an overwhelming influence on the way we work, think, move, play and fight."
Eric Foner
"Ranging from the early industrial revolution in England to the factories in modern-day China that produce iPhones, with stops along the way in New England mill towns, Henry Ford’s Detroit and Stalin’s Russia, this remarkable book traces the history of the giant factory and the people—capital, labor, consumers, and fascinated observers—whose lives it shaped. If you want to know where the world we live in came from, this is a good place to start."
Economist
"[A] lively chronicle of the factory.… [Freeman] delves into the nitty-gritty of manufacturing. He successfully melds together those nuggets with social history, on the shop floor and beyond the factory walls."
MAY 2018 - AudioFile
We talk a great deal about jobs. Now comes an audiobook about the places where the jobs come. And go. The author has written a marvelous history of the physical and intellectual effect that factories have had on the United States and the world, especially the fear and wonder that factories have inspired over their approximately 300-year history. Narrator Stephen Bowlby approaches this audiobook as a straightforward work of history, using his deep voice to simply tell the story rather than to put his personal imprint on it. He does, however, dive deeply into character voices that are entertaining but seem to come out of nowhere compared to his inelastic reading of the narrative. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-11-22
Wide-ranging study of the world's factories over the last three centuries.The birthplace of the factory may have been England, as Freeman (History/Queen's Coll.; American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945-2000, 2012, etc.) writes, but the idea of concentrated labor spread quickly throughout the world, with changes befitting local conditions as it went. For example, whereas the British countryside was crowded and full of employable men, the hinterlands of New England were not, leading capitalists there to find "a brilliant solution in the recruitment of young women" who, coming and going into marriage and their family households, would be a constantly changing cast of characters and not a "permanent proletariat." With workers came management theories such as Taylorism, named for Frederick Winslow Taylor, who, of a liberal and educated Philadelphia family, defied expectations to become first a factory worker and then a consultant on factory labor—and whose practices "meant a loss of autonomy and an attack on craft pride" in the eyes of many workers and activists, lending credence to Marxist ideas of labor value and alienation. As Freeman notes, industrial work has fallen off considerably in the U.S., which has led to wholesale re-evaluations of the political place of unions, the role of workers in mass progressive movements, and so forth, even as manufacturing work has remained mostly steady worldwide, with about a third of the workforce engaged in industry, most employed in factories. The author also notes that factories have life cycles just as does everything else, though these are recognized differently from place to place. In China, for instance, tinkering with the industrial mix and downsizing for efficiency would run the risk of igniting political opposition, with the result that "the Chinese government moves gingerly in its prolonged effort to shut down unneeded or inefficient state-owned factory giants."We are all implicated in the world of the giant factory, but students of economic history and geopolitics in particular will find much of value here.
