We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills." Many factories that operated over the last two centuries--such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn--were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to today.
In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, 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 textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today's behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam.
The giant factory, Freeman shows, led a revolution that transformed human life and the environment. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Charles Dickens, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. He chronicles protests against standard industry practices from unions and workers' rights groups that led to shortened workdays, child labor laws, protection for organized labor, and much more.
In Behemoth, Freeman also explores how factories became objects of great wonder that both inspired and horrified artists and writers in their time. He examines representations of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky.
Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.
Industry Reviews
"An insightful history of giant factories... Mr Freeman rolls up his sleeves and 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, from union battles to worker exploitation and, in the case of Foxconn, suicides." -- The Economist
"... [Freeman] lay[s] out two centuries of factory production all over the world in ways that are 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." -- International New York Times
"Freeman has written a superb account... The author's sympathy, insight and exemplary anecdotes make this a marvellous book." -- The Guardian
"Carefully researched and energetically written, Freeman's book takes in the first factories in Britain and New England, the great mills of late-Victorian Pennsylvania, the rise of Fordism in the 1920s, the world of the industrial Soviet Union and today's colossal factories in China and Vietnam." -- The Sunday Times Ireland
"... Behemoth is a tour de force, a powerful liberal retelling of the factory narrative at a time of Trump and all he represents, when it badly needs to be retold." -- Times Higher Education
"Freeman does an essential service by publicising the continuance of a system whose foundations rest on a banal evil." -- The Spectator
"... fascinating book..." -- The New Statesman
"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." -- Jennifer Szalai - The New York Times
"Fascinating... Freeman shows how factories have had an overwhelming influence on the way we work, think, move, play and fight." -- Scott W. Berg - The Washington Post
"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 - The Wall Street Journal
"It is a book of epic scope." -- 5 Star Review - The Telegraph
"[Joshua Freeman] handles his material 'with the seriousness it deserves' and if it '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 honourable refusal to resort to simplistic notions of grand progress or portentous doom'." -- The Oldie
