'Behemoth' book review: We are what we manufacture

BEHEMOTH
A History of the Factory and the
Making of the Modern World
Joshua B Freeman
Illustrated; W.W. Norton & Company
427 pages; $27.95
 
Joshua B Freeman doesn’t chronicle the aftershocks of the loss of five million factory jobs from the American landscape or show you the impact of disappearing factory jobs on towns across America. And I wish he had addressed the abandoned plants, escalating drug crime and crowded food pantries.
 
But what this distinguished professor of history at CUNY’s Queens College does is lay out two centuries of factory production all over the world in ways that are accessible, cogent, occasionally riveting and thoroughly new. The history of large factories, as Mr Freeman outlines it, is the history of the modern world and most everything we see, experience and touch.
 
If you are reading this review on an iPad or iPhone or another Silicon Valley-designed computer screen, then Mr Freeman’s history will not only explain how and where your device came to be produced but also how the story of modern production parallels the story of your relative level of affluence.
 
There are few items in our homes that didn’t originate as disparate components in faraway supply plants, touched by many hands in multiple countries. But whose hands actually make and order the assembling of the products, from the B-24 builders in Ypsilanti, Michigan, whose goods flew into combat during World War II, to the corporate owners who erected three million square meters of yellow netting to prevent overworked Chinese Foxconn workers from jumping to their deaths in 2010?
 
Mr Freeman tells us who both the makers and the corporate owners are, and, more impressively, he shows us how, over a relatively short period of time, their stories come to be entangled. He wants us to leave his book grappling with the question: How should human beings balance economic good with environmental harm, need with greed?
 
He is more concerned with the building up of factories than the tearing down, chronicling the pros and cons of factory work with a scholar’s even gaze. When a developing country embraces manufacturing to propel itself away from agrarian subsistence, the work is invariably rote and exploitive and often even life-threatening. But, overall, life expectancy climbs and poverty and disease plummet.
 
That was as true in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe — before which only half of French children, plagued by hunger and disease, lived to see the age of 20 — as it is now in Ethiopia, where the producers of Ivanka Trump’s shoes recently relocated from Dongguan, China, chasing a more desperate work force content to work for a pittance (roughly $30 a month) rather than paying the rising wages of their predecessors in China ($560).
 
Capitalism, naturally, takes advantage of such increasingly swift and secretive moves. It was the striving capitalists, after all, who pioneered the world’s initial giant factories — first among them a British wigmaker named Richard Arkwright who patented his spinning machine in 1768, then created an empire of steam-powered cotton mills. Arkwright knew he had arrived when he was able to lend the Duchess of Devonshire £5,000 to pay down her gambling debts, even if he and his fellow mill owners used labourers as young as seven years old.
 
Freeman loops around the globe nimbly, drawing parallels between the farmers’ daughters who sent money home from Lowell and the Chinese migrants who do the same from Guangdong almost two centuries later. Though I wish he would have lingered longer on the workers’ lives, he has a sharp eye for the raw, gut-kicking detail. A riveter in the Urals freezes to death on a scaffolding. Middle managers in Michigan have to learn the words for “hurry up” in English, German, Polish, and Italian to keep Henry Ford’s assembly line humming along.
 
Mr Freeman’s final chapter, “Foxconn City,” is the finest and most searing profile of wealth-makers in the bunch, revealing the sheer drudgery of overworked people who make sneakers and iPhones but can’t afford to buy them and the quiet deal-making machinations fuelling Silicon Valley’s billionaire class.
 
When wages rise because of retention problems or labour unrest, the Chinese government is happy to help Apple and others by handing out tax breaks and transportation projects to spur new, lower-paying factories in China’s hinterlands. No such help is on tap for a worker, trained with a specialised skill, stuck in a country that no longer supports the industry she works in and living in places like Flint, Michigan, which can’t even guarantee the water is safe.
 
Behemoth is contextually thin in places, especially Mr Freeman’s take on deindustrialisation. He doesn’t mention that, as life expectancy in East Asia climbed, mortality rates rose in America, or that drug dealers, not farm girls seeking sewing jobs, now flock to Lowell — a distribution hub for heroin.
 
Mr Freeman only cursorily explores the aftermath of globalisation, automation and unfettered free trade, and he doesn’t ask what the government owes the people still living in America’s former mill and mining towns. More robust retraining and access to need-based college financial aid? Incentives to resettle elsewhere? A New Deal for the displaced and drug-addicted?

New York Times News Service