Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

by Joshua B. Freeman

Overview

"Freeman’s rich and ambitious Behemoth depicts a world in retreat that still looms large in the national imagination.…More than an economic history, or a chronicle of architectural feats and labor movements." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

In an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam. Behemoth offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356625
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Joshua B. Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. His previous books include American Empire and Working-Class New York, among others. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Chapter 1 "Like Minerva From The Brain Of Jupiter" The Invention of the Factory 1

Chapter 2 "The Living Light" New England Textiles and Visions of Utopia 43

Chapter 3 "The Progress Of Civilization" Industrial Exhibitions, Steelmaking, and the Price of Prometheanism 80

Chapter 4 "I Worship Factories" Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory 118

Chapter 5 "Communism Is Soviet Power Plus The Electrification Of The Whole Country" Crash Industrialization in the Soviet Union 169

Chapter 6 "Common Requirements Of Industrialization" Gold War Mass Production 226

Chapter 7 "Foxconn City" Giant Factories in China and Vietnam 270

Conclusion 314

Acknowledgements 323

Notes 327

Illustration Credits 401

Index 403

Editorial Reviews

"[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."

Economist

"Fascinating.…Freeman shows how factories have had an overwhelming influence on the way we work, think, move, play and fight."— Scott W. Berg Washington Post

"[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."— Economist

"Remarkable.… If you want to know where the world we live in came from, this is a good place to start."— Eric Foner

"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."— Jonathan Rose Wall Street Journal

"[An] immersive, trivia-packed history."— Henry Grabar Slate

"An effortless and engaging guide."— David Sessions New Republic

"Freeman has written a superb account.… Almost every page contains a memorable fact or an intriguing thought."— Ian Jack Guardian

"Excellent."— National Book Review

"Freeman uses the history of the factory as a way to re-examine how workers are treated worldwide."— Bradley Babendir Pacific Standard

"A global tour of three centuries, from English textile mills to Detroit steel plants to Chinese iPhone factories."— Tom Beer Newsday

From the Publisher

…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 Book Review - Beth Macy

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.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

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.

Kirkus Reviews

2018 Cundill History Prize, Short-listed