Behemoth ─ A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

Giant factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, have long been celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from their very beginnings, when William Blake called them “dark Satanic mills,” they have also fueled our fears of the future.In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares. He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and iPhones in China and Vietnam. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. And he explores the representation of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky.