Behemoth

Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, Kwame, and Krumah visited them. In the 20th century, they became a favorite subject of painters, photographers, and filmmakers, leading artists like Charles Sheeler, Diego Rivera, and Dziga Vdyrtov. Political thinkers from Alexander Hamilton to Mao Tse-Tung debated their significance. From 18th century England on, observers recognized the revolutionary nature of the factory. Factories visibly ushered in a new world. Their novel machinery, workforces of unprecedented size, and outflow of uniform products all commanded attention. So did the physical, social, and cultural arrangements invented to accommodate them. Producing vast quantities of consumer and producer goods, giant industrial enterprises brought a radical break from the past in material life and intellectual horizons. The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again, it served as a measuring rod for attitudes toward work, consumption, and power, a physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares about the future. In our time, the ubiquity of factory-made products and the lack of novelty in the existence of the factory has dulled appreciation of the extraordinary human experience associated with it. At least in the developed world, we've come to take factory-made modernity for granted as a natural condition of life. Yet, it is anything but. Only a brief flash in the history of humankind, the age of the factory does not go as far back as Voltaire's first play or the whaling ships of Nantucket. The creation of the factory required exceptional ingenuity, obsession, and misery. We have inherited its miraculous productive power and long history of exploitation without giving it much thought. But we should. The factory still defines our world. For nearly half a century, scholars and journalists in the United States have been announcing the end of the Industrial Age, seeing the country as transforming into a post-industrial society. Today, only 8% of American workers are in manufacturing, down from 24% in 1960. The factory and its workers have lost the cultural purchase they once had. But worldwide, we are in a heyday of manufacturing. According to data compiled by the International Labor Organization, in 2010, nearly 29% of the global workforce labored in industry, down only a bit from a 2006 pre-recession high of 30%, and considerably above the 1994 figure of 22%. In China, the world's largest manufacturer, in 2015, 43% of the workforce was employed in industry. The biggest factories in history are operating right now, making products like smartphones, laptops, and brand-name sneakers that, for billions of people around the world, define what it means to be modern. These factories are staggeringly large, with 100,000, 200,000, or more workers. But they're not without precedent. Outsized factories have been a feature of industrial life for more than two centuries. In each era since the factory arrived on the stage of history, there have been industrial complexes that have stood out on the social and cultural landscape by dint of their size, their machinery and methods, the struggles of their workers, and the products they produced. Their very names—Lowell or Magnitogorsk or now Foxconn City— have broadly evoked sets of images and associations. This book tells the story of these landmark factories as industrial giantism migrated from England in the 18th century to the American textile and steel industries in the 19th century, the automobile industry in the early 20th century, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the new socialist states after World War II, culminating in the Asian behemoths of our time.