This history traces the rise and transformation of the factory from its birth in 18th century England across Europe, the United States, Stalinist Russia, and contemporary China.
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.
