Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World Reprint Edition

Fascinating book and very well written. Freeman has a great depth of knowledge about the subject and presents his arguments lucidly. This isn't a book about factories per se, although how they worked from the earliest British spinning mills in the 18th century to what's (rather mysteriously)going on at today's gigantic plants like Foxconn City in China where iPhones are manufactured, are interesting reads in and of themselves. What makes the book larger than its subject (factories) is how those who labored in these locations impacted society as a whole, and in many cases, the reverse. Henry Ford's Highland Park plant, the first to use assembly line manufacturing in cranking out Model Ts, actively encouraged visitors, most entranced by this new technology; the physical plant was used to promote the product, the same for the later River Rouge plant that I found fascinating - coal, iron ore, limestone came in from Ford-owned mines on Ford-owned ships and railroads, coking ovens and blast furnaces made steel - and a textile mill and glass factory at the site other components of automobiles - engine blocks poured and bored, sheet steel stamped, parts cast, and all the self-manufactured components emerged from the assembly line as a completed automobile. Freeman then moves on to state-sponsored gigantism, notably what was built during Stalin's first five-year plan, only achieved with a large amount of U.S. (paid for) help, something I was totally unaware of, as I expect the reader will be as well. Stalin's industrialization was not hailed by the state as necessarily the wondrous products turned out, but as the victory of socialism. However, both capitalist and socialist factories suffered the same problem: Communist theoreticians had long attacked factories in the West as exploiters of the workers, done to maximize the profits that accrued to factory owners. These "excess profits" would also be achieved in the Soviet system, now - by some fast mental gymnastics - viewed as OK as these profits would be owned "by the people," not an argument bought by those laboring in the plants.Common to the establishment of all these factories from the beginning to the present was how to assemble the necessary labor pool to run the machines? In and of itself an interesting topic I will not belabor here. Again common to all this history is how was this labor pool controlled, kept on the job under often horrendous working conditions? Techniques varied from raw coercion to building mini "workers' paradises" with decent housing and other amenities at the job site. Almost always, the either harsh or "make nice" attempts failed, in the USA as seen by the rise in the labor union movement starting in the 1930s that prompted manufacturers after WWII to abandon the mega-plant concept and the movement toward smaller plants scattered about the country - almost always to non-union, lower wage scale states, a move, along with the build out of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower, that changed the face of American manufacturing. The change in Chinese manufacturing from Mao to the present - and the change in the ideological justification for same - alone justifies reading this book. As noted earlier, Ford was eager to have people visit his first factories and people enthusiastically responded; today, does anyone know - or care - where their iPhone or sneakers were made?

Not quite the book I expected. Initially it was tedious, but the history was necessary to show progression to current situations. It seems less a book than a graduate thesis. It's a good overview, and gets more interesting when it hits the 20th Century. I think the title is somewhat misleading, but not by much considering the context. It's a very good societal study, and it's focus is primarily based in England (origination), the United States, and then China. While example abound with brief references elsewhere, ultimately it defines the American experience, and helps comprehend our current decline in manufacturing, mostly due to technology/robotics. If anything, it describes the monotony of factory work, the physical demands, and is an insight as to why many Americans are loath to engage in it. What is most interesting, to me anyway, is that the 'golden age' of American factory production was relatively short lived, considering our history, and it's decline relative fast. Those that recall 'the good old days' seem to mostly be only from one or two generations in the first third of the 20th century. I would have liked to read a bit more about how unions not only, initially, improved factory life (middle class America), but also essentially destroyed it. Overall, a good read for the second half. It should be noted that 75% of the book is actually the 'story', with the last 25% being all referenced materials. I would have liked 'more'.

Amazing depth of research, well presented. To my surprise, the chapter (5) on the Soviet Union in the 1920 and 1930s was fascinating. Surprising how much coordination there was between the Soviets and Henry Ford, GM, and U.S. engineers and architects. It took me awhile to get into the book, but as I passed page 50 or 60 it became a page-turner that I have trouble putting down. Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the factory and industrialization. A+++++

Well researched & well written, but you'd never know fossil fuels (especially coal) had much to do with sustaining the factory system & industrial capitalism long after it ran out of places to exploit water power. The author mentions steam power many times but he rarely mentions the fact that steam power came from coal; & he never grapples with the question: WOULD THE FACTORY SYSTEM & INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM HAVE BECOME THE DOMINANT FORM OF PRODUCTION ALL OVER THE WORLD IF THE EARTH HAD NOT SUPPLIED IT WITH AN ABUNDANT, CHEAP SOURCE OF CONCENTRATED ENERGY?

Very thoughtful and expansive history of the history of the modern day factory. It starts with the rise of the early factories of the cotton industry in England which became the blue print for the development of the factory - from the way worker's laboured to the architetecture of the factory building. The English cotton mills then jump Atlantic to the New England and he compares and contrasts the development of the New England cotton mills to those England.Of course no discussion of the history of the factory would be complete without that of Ford and he spends a good deal of time on the innovations that Ford made and some of the surprising connections to the development of the factory system in the Soviet Union. The discussion of the Soviet Union was particularly interesting as it showed there really is very little difference between the "socialist" model and the "capitalist" model of building and running a factory. He closes by a discussion of the monster factories in China that produce so many of the goods we use today.He covers the technological changes that made mass industrialization possible, the growth of management theory and the ugly and brutal history of worker exploitation and attempts at unionization.The factory as always been a symbol of modernity and progress and conversely a symbol of evil - environmental destruction, exploitation of workers and and the loss of an idealized, simpler way of life. It is interesting how he traces the history of societal views and its ebb and flow as the factory of a force for positive change versus negative change.A fascinating read.

My first job after leaving school was as a labourer in a foundry not much more than a couple of miles from where Joshua Freeman’s paean to the factory starts, the Silk Mill in Derby, generally regarded as the first factory in the world. (David Olusoga, in his otherwise beyond-contention The Cult Of Progress, for some reason argues the honour goes to Cromford Mill, just outside Derby.) It’s quite likely that the experiences I gained from the foundry are at the root of my interest in industrial history and organisation. I count Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus as a favourite read in that respect. Behemoth counts as a good complement to that work.From 18th Century Britain, via the squalor of industrialised Manchester, Freeman crosses the Atlantic and recounts America’s own industrial genesis in Lowell, Massachusetts. The textile mills in New England brought mixed blessings for their workers, he shows. On the one hand it gave many young women their first taste of economic self-reliance. On the other, its workers were subject to a regimented lifestyle within purpose-built company barracks, and included a large proportion of child labour.As manufacturing extended to other industries in the US, some of which, such as steel-making, the railways, automobiles and electric goods had never really existed in any form before factories, so the squalor to be found in Manchester also became a feature of Chicago, Detroit and other American cities. So also developed worker resistance to exploitation, with demands for shorter hours, better pay and safer working conditions. These were met by what was to become the stock response of capitalism to dissent: lock-outs, victimisation of organisers, and escalating violence at the hands of company goons, Pinkertons or, when the company owners could enlist it, the state itself in the shape of the police - although sometimes local police actually sided with the workers - and the army. (The multifaceted nature of this class war is captured in more detail by Richard White in The Republic For Which It Stands).Between the wars, the expertise gained by Americans in large factories was shared in a possibly unexpected place: the Soviet Union. Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership had identified the need to industrialise quickly and produce goods essential for the transformation of the Soviet Union from largely feudal and impoverished to post-capitalist and prosperous in one fell swoop. From nothing the Soviets created gigantic factories, exemplified by Freeman in the tractorstroi in Stalingrad, incorporating the industrial architectural and manufacturing techniques familiar in such US plants as Ford’s River Rouge in Dearborn. Freeman here is at his best, describing the massive, truly promethean effort involved in development, along with which illiterate peasants found themselves catapulted into the twentieth century. (The culture shock was not unidirectional, however; American and European advisers in the Soviet Union would have been challenged by the fact that a large proportion of the Soviet workforce was female, engaged in what at home would have been regarded as “men’s” jobs.) He also raises the potential paradox of a workers’ state replicating the working conditions of capitalism.The tractorstroi never quite achieved its ambitious production targets, and quite independent of this relative shortcoming – to construct so much out of nothing could hardly be characterised as a failure - many of the stalwart workers and managers of that and other factories fell victim to the deathly hand of Stalinism and its purges.Freeman concludes by examining factories in another so-called workers’ state, China, in the 21st century, concentrating particularly on Foxconn and its massive industrial complex in Shenzhen, the largest in the world, ever. Here the workers are, as were those in Lowell, housed in company barracks with communal bedrooms, a strict code of conduct and gender segregation. Unlike Lowell, however, the complex is surrounded by a security fence and is generously laced with surveillance cameras, sinister features which should likely have us all worried. (First, they build that wall…)This “Foxconn City”, however, goes against trends in the US and some other industrialised nations (with the exception, interestingly, of Germany). There, rather than concentrate production, owners have spread it around geographically, partly for good economic reasons, partly because of firms’ experience of disrupted operations at the hands of a relatively small number of key workers in the production chain in large factories, and partly, in the case of the US in particular, to move them away from regions with a history of unionisation and into those with what are referred to, without apparent irony or self-parody, “right to work” states. Factories are now hence smaller in these places. Pay is also lower and the old rust belt cities hollowed out and troubled.It is true that Freeman’s narrative bypasses a number of elements in the history of mass production. He mentions Adam Smith, Taylorism and Gantt charts, but does not mention divisionalisation (and Alfred Sloan himself merits only one brief reference), 6 Sigma, Lean or JIT (or Toyota, for that matter), and there is no sign of Deming, Coase, Williamson and other theorists of manufacturing and the firm. Having said which, it’s easy to envisage that dotting every single i and crossing every t would have converted what is in its present form an elegant history into an unwieldy (and heavy!) tome. So I make the point only to dismiss it.As it is, it’s an excellent read.

Interesting story, well written.

Reads very well and is informative but I would liked to have seen a chunk of coloured photos showing some of the factories described.

Very interesting book tracing factory size and production from the industrial revolution to China. Fascinating speculation about just why current Chinese factories are so large (to get retail bargaining clout not economies of scale) and a wonderful snippet of detail about a new Chinese-financed factory....in Ethiopia, where wages are lower.