Behemoth

Starred review from December 4, 2017
Freeman (American Empire), professor of history at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, recounts the development of the factory, which over the past 300 years has come to symbolize both utopian possibilities and appalling realities. He notes that “we live in a factory-made world,” yet most consumers know little about these places or the experiences of those who work in them. Freeman begins in 18th-century England with the first factories, which were synonymous with filth and misery—William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” He moves to 19th-century New England, where paternal industrialists hoped that they could both reap large profits and provide their employees with excellent working conditions; their idealism was soon replaced by a drive for ever-greater profits. Freeman is sharply critical of the technocrats and managers who regularly attempt to reduce wages and increase control over labor, yet he also sees the factory as a workplace that holds the possibility of liberation; Ford auto workers’ successful unionizing efforts, for example, “gave mass production a new, more democratic meaning.” Freeman goes on to describe modern Chinese factories, noting that some have become notorious for conditions that have caused workers to commit suicide, while others offer lavish recreational amenities that are irresistible to rural migrants. 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.

January 1, 2018

In this expansive new book, Freeman (history, Queens Coll.; Working-Class New York) traces the history of factories from their advent in 18th-century England to their dissemination throughout America and the Soviet Union as 20th-century symbols of progress and modernity, and finally their migration to China and other countries in Asia. A recurring character throughout is American carmaker Henry Ford, and an integral idea to factories is that of mass production and automation. The book satisfyingly shows the undiscriminating reach of Fordism from America to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Besides focusing on the rise and spread of factories, changes in factory labor, and creation and struggle of unions, Freeman also looks at the way factories permeated the culture of art, literature, movies, and politics. Present-day factories are bigger than ever but are no longer the beacons of culture, progress, and modernity they once were. Instead, factory life is shrouded in mystery and working conditions are mired in scandal. VERDICT Freeman has provided an ambitious, sweeping, and well-researched history of factories, which remains accessible and relevant to general readers.--Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2017
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.

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January 1, 2018
Besides their unfortunate contribution to urban blight and toxic waste, factories have played an enormous role in shaping our consumption-driven society. 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. Beginning with mid-eighteenth-century silk and cotton mills that employed a few hundred people, Freeman follows the growth of factories to today's sprawling behemoths that mass-produce toys and sneakers with the labor of several hundred thousand. In addition to discussing the visions of business titans, ranging from Ford to Tesla, while tracing how manufacturing processes evolved from cotton gins to robotic assembly lines, the author turns the spotlight on the changing conditions of workers, with unionized teams mercifully supplanting child and slave labor. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)