OPINION:
BEHEMOTH: A HISTORY OF THE FACTORY AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD
By Joshua B. Freeman
W.W. Norton & Company, $27.95, 464 pages
For three centuries, the factory system has thrived in our world. It became an important friend and ally of capitalists and communists. It played an important role in the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. It created products that led to greater economic growth, job opportunities and market share. It pitted bosses against workers, caused the rise of trade unions, and could make or break the future of a city, town and community.
Joshua Freeman’s book, “Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World,” examines the growth of this massive manufacturing sector. He acknowledges people “pay little attention to the industrial facilities on which they depend, and most consumers “have never been in a factory, nor do they know much about what goes on inside one.” But this makes little sense to the author, since “the factory still defines our world” and “[w]ithout it, their lives could not exist as they are.”
The earliest factories were tied to the silk industry.
In 1704, Derby barrister Thomas Cotchett built a “three-storied, water-powered mill to house imported Dutch silk-throwing machines,” but was unsuccessful. (His name is curiously omitted in Mr. Freeman’s book.) This was followed by John and Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill, which was reportedly built near Cotchett’s failed venture in 1721. It was a “five-storey, rectangular brick building” which had “all the main characteristics of a modern factory: a large workforce engaged in coordinated production using powered machinery, in its case driven by a twenty-three-foot-high waterwheel.”
The latter Lombe surprisingly claimed “his mill was never a great success, in part because of his difficulty in getting raw silk from Italy.” But it was viewed as a success in his time, and an important model for other would-be entrepreneurs to emulate. In particular, Mr. Freeman writes “the lasting importance of the Lombes’ factory was not as a template for silk mills but as a template for cotton mills” operated by businessmen like James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright.
A typical feature of the factory was its behemoth size. Why? Mr. Freeman refers to Charles Babbage’s well-known book on machinery and manufacturers to provide some insight. In the mathematician/inventor’s view, “efficient production units had to be multiples of the number of workers needed for the most efficient division of labor in a particular production process.” To put it another way, the bigger the factory, the better.
Factories manufacturing silk, cotton, textiles and other products became commonplace in Europe and the United States. They mesmerized the public with their power, size and influence, and led to intriguing analyses by well-known figures.
Charles Dickens spent an entire day visiting America’s biggest cotton manufacturer in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1842. One of the main characters in Charlotte Bronte’s “Shirley” (1849) is Robert Moore, a mill owner who treats his machinery better than his employees. William Blake used the term “dark Satanic Mills” in 1804 in the preface to his famous poem, “Milton.” Friedrich Engels “provided some of the most graphic descriptions we have of the miserable living conditions of English factory workers” before he wrote “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) with Karl Marx.
The story of the factory is also a multi-faceted one when it comes to Western democracies and old Communist nations.
Iron and steel mills were built in the West, for example, and they “were often hailed as markers of national greatness and the advance of civilization.” Railroads and steamboats were also built in large-scale factories, and provided Americans (and others) with the inherent belief that “machines were opening the door to a new age of unprecedented bounty, freedom, and national power.”
On the flip side, the Soviet Union’s dark imagery was also tied to factories. “Stalinist industrial giantism, for better and for worse,” writes Mr. Freeman, “became one of the main paths for trying to achieve prosperity and modernity.” But instead of replicating America’s important path to capitalism and freedom, the Iron Curtain of communism used this industry to develop into a “Promethean utopianism that mixed huge social ambitions with enormous human suffering.”
While factories still exist in countries like China and Vietnam, manufacturers are gradually using new strategies like the Internet to reduce labor costs and succeed in the global economy. Nevertheless, Mr. Freeman makes a strong case in “Behemoth” that the giant factory “was central to both capitalist and socialist development, not only economically but socially, culturally, and politically.” It may very well be the great economic equalizer.
• Michael Taube is a frequent contributor to The Washington Times.
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