Joshua B. Freeman. Behemoth

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World weaves together seven case studies of a phenomenon—the development of the world’s largest factories of their respective eras—that has been, oddly, both overemphasized and overlooked. In one sense, as Joshua B. Freeman reminds us, we never lived in an “industrial era” dominated by these iconic factories. Only a handful of countries have ever had even 50 percent of their labor force in manufacturing, and only for short periods. Moreover, giant factories have always been the exception: the average number of employees in a U.S. factory probably never reached fifty employees, and is today around thirty-five. But on the other hand, Freeman reminds us that our own era is anything but post-industrial: almost everything that we use every day, including much of our food, comes from factories. Thus this book has two separate but related projects. On the one hand, it looks at giant factories as one of many possible strategies for organizing production—particularly for managing labor—and tracks how they became more or less attractive to managers over time; in this context, each one becomes a barometer of how geography, technology, social structure, and politics shaped industrial possibilities in a given time and place. On the other hand, Behemoth shows how the largest plants became lenses through which particular societies imagined themselves and their futures, even though they were obviously atypical.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Economics · Economy · Factory (object-oriented programming) · Industrial society · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies