Page 37 - C:\Users\r10sullivan\Documents\Flip PDF Professional\Bridgewater_Review_Nov_2018\

BOOK REVIEWS

We Are What We Make world has been the subject of wither-

ing critiques from the political left and
Todd Harris right alike and has been implicated in
tectonic political plate-shifting such as
Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of Brexit and the 2016 election of Donald
the Factory and the Making of the Modern World Trump. As the factories went dark,
something else was extinguished as
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). well—a vision of the future where
material prosperity is widely shared
he shirt on your back. The phone in your and children outpace the accomplish-
hand. The shoes on your feet. What do these ments of their parents.
Tthree items have in common? Each of them Freeman’s sure-handed exploration

was very likely made in a factory. For better or worse, reminds readers that factories used to
elicit strong emotions—awe, wonder,
we live in a factory-made world, or at least many of hope and fear. The powerful psycho-
us do. Modern life is built on three centuries’ worth logical responses many people had to
of advances in manufacturing efficiency, productivity factories was at least partly attributable
to their sheer size. Ford’s River Rouge
and technology. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and plant, designed by Alfred Kahn, the
the Making of the Modern World written by Joshua B. foremost factory designer of the twenti-
eth century, had a building with a floor
Freeman, is a cogent, novel and accessible overview of area of 1,450,000 square feet, 142 miles
how the modern factory system developed. Freeman, of conveyors and monorails, and was

a distinguished professor of history at CUNY-Queens situated on a 1,096-acre site. At its peak,
in 1929, it employed 102,811 workers.
College, claims that large factories impact almost It was the largest and most complicated
everything that we touch, see and experience, and
underpin the modern consumer economy. Many

people would find it difficult to survive, even for a
short time, without factory-made products.

Freeman ranges widely across place United States lost nearly five million
and time, transporting the reader factory jobs between 2000 and 2016.
from eighteenth-century England to In 1970, more than a quarter of U.S.
twenty-first-century China. In his employees worked in manufactur-
superb telling, Freeman deftly connects ing. By 2010, only 1 in 10 did. This
the factory, which he defines as “a large trend is not restricted to the United
workforce engaged in coordinated pro- States. According to the Organization
duction using powered machinery” to for Economic Cooperation and
important cultural, social, political and Development (OECD) data, Germany’s
economic consequences. share of manufacturing jobs has been
halved since the early 1970’s, and
Freeman’s book can be read as a cri
de Coeur to push the factory back Australia’s has dropped by two-thirds.
into modern consciousness. In the These jobs are commonly seen as
United States, it is typically the absence “good jobs”—relatively stable and
of factories garners attention. The comparably high-paying. The steady
erosion of factory jobs in the western

November 2018 35