At a time when the ghost of the American dream hovers over headlines...Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World should be required reading for all Americans ... Though I wish he would have lingered longer on the workers’ lives, he has a sharp eye for the raw, gut-kicking detail ... Behemoth is contextually thin in places, especially Freeman’s take on deindustrialization ...
Freeman only cursorily explores the aftermath of globalization, automation and unfettered free trade, and he doesn’t ask what the government owes the people still living in America’s former mill and mining towns ...
Perhaps it’s beyond the purview of a historian to wrestle with such questions. Perhaps it is enough that this thoroughly researched history makes us question our own accumulation of the stuff in front of us and our complicity in the truth we dare not see.
Ultimately, Mr. Freeman can’t decide whether industrialism represents progress or dystopia, and that ambivalence reflects his clear eyes and fair-mindedness. He often lets workers speak for themselves, and they don’t always agree ... Mr. Freeman reminds us that, benevolent or tyrannical, the factory was an exponential leap in the human experience. And anyway, he concludes, 'we seem to be stuck with it.'
Freeman acknowledges the enormous human cost of industrialization without reducing all factories to William Blake’s 'satanic mills' ... Freeman’s determination to isolate smaller slices in the factory’s history, rather than drop an all-encompassing tome at our feet, is appreciated. Still, his time- and space-skimming approach does leave gaps. Factories have been the darling of fascists as well, and Germany’s gigantic wartime industrial machine and its peacetime descendants receive little attention. The book touches only lightly on the culture of mass consumption ... It’s an enticing and important chicken-and-egg question: Did great big factories create our insatiable material desires, or vice versa? Readers might have benefited from a fuller attempt at an answer.
If you teach economic history for a living, you’ll find Behemoth to be essential reading. The rest of us will probably find it must-dig-in-and-push-on reading. Still, Freeman throws in a few sparking bits. For example, he outlines the role of the factory in art (think of Margaret Bourke-White’s dramatic photos, Charlie Chaplin’s 'Modern Times' or Diego Rivera’s mural at River Rouge) — and even gives us an unusual factory connection to the phrase 'knocked up.'
In addition to outlining the forces that encouraged early manufacturing to be concentrated in megastructures—such as limited transportation networks, isolated power sources, economies of scale, quality and production control, and the protection of trade secrets—Freeman devotes much of the book to the giant factory’s socializing role ... The book’s parade of names and places can be overwhelming, as the narrative moves from cotton to steel to cars to electronics. And yet the focus on megafactories keeps things tight. Their world is surprisingly small, with each one influenced by the last. (American manufacturers, for example, were heavily involved in the Soviet Union’s early industrialization.) Freeman has an eye for the anecdotes that tie factory policy to everyday life...
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 ... Behemoth doesn’t romanticize the earlier incarnations of gigantic factories, but Freeman understands why some people did — and still do.
Freeman’s fascinating history of factories, even with its darker chapters of labor unrest, illustrates that humans have persistently searched for ways to reinvent the world, striving to find ways to make their lives and work easier.
An effortless and engaging guide, Freeman embarks on a tour of the last three centuries, in which the factory played a defining role in world history ... Behemoth shows that the idealism of the factory was not limited to the capitalist West. The process of industrialization in the Soviet Union differed from the capitalist sort in that it openly avowed its desire to change every aspect of social life, and in that it took place in a society where profit had been abolished ... Freeman makes an impressive effort to cover both the history of twentieth-century China and post-1970s globalization...But here the weakness of the factory as a historical subject begins to become apparent: The true subject of Freeman’s story is global capitalism itself.
As Queens College history professor Freeman observes in this absorbing, multi-layered history of these large manufacturing facilities, the vast majority of goods in our homes and workplaces, from microwave ovens to blue jeans, were made in factories ... While Freeman underscores the invaluable benefits factories have contributed to civilization, his sobering dissection of their negative environmental impact shows how much room there is for improvement.
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.
Wide-ranging study of the world’s factories over the last three centuries ... 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.
