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.
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 has written a superb account... The author's sympathy, insight and exemplary anecdotes make this a marvellous book." -- The Guardian
"... 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
"... [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
"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
"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
"... superb account... Almost every page contains a memorable fact or an intriguing thought... [Freeman's] sympathy, insight and exemplary anecdotes make this a marvellous book." -- The Guardian
"[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
