Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World - Softcover

Joshua B. Freeman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393356620 ISBN 13: 9780393356625

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Synopsis

"Freeman has written a superb account of how the material world in his phrase became "factory made"...The author's sympathy, insight and exemplary anecdotes make this a marvellous book." Ian Jack, Book of the Week, The Guardian

Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of the future.

Telling the story of the factory, Joshua B. Freeman takes readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to today's behemoths making trainers, toys and iPhones in China and Vietnam. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx, Ford and Stalin. And he explores the representation of factories in the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin and Diego Rivera.

Short-listed for the Cundill History Prize, 2018

About this title

Review

"...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

"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

"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

"Almost every page contains a memorable fact or an intriguing thought..."

--The Guardian

"The history of large factories, as Freeman outlines it, is the history of the modern world and most everything we see, experience and touch."

--The New York Times Book Review

"It is one of the more valuable aspects of Freeman's book that he also deals with the mythology surrounding the factory system, as well as its artistic expressions and the social struggles it generated. ...fascinating book..."

--New Statesman

"Freeman does an essential service by publicising the continuance of a system whose foundations rest on a banal evil."

--The Spectator

"If you want to know more where the world we live in came from, Joshua Freeman's remarkable Behemoth is a good place to start."

--Eric Foner

About the Author

Joshua B. Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. His previous books include American Empire and Working-Class New York, among others. He lives in New York City.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0393356620
• ISBN 13: 9780393356625
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448