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Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, in which he is buried in a simple tomb with a famous Latin epitaph, which can be paraphrased for our purposes as “if you are searching for a monument, look about you.” Joshua Freeman, in his sparkling history of the factory, says much the same about his book's subject: if you want a monument to the factory, look about you, to your house, your study, your clothes, or your desk. What is there that hasn't been manufactured in a factory? And yet Freeman's book is also something of an epitaph to a business model. We live, we are often told, in a postindustrial age. The factory has lost its ability to awe or to amaze (though not, perhaps, the ability to produce indignation and anger). The factory as technology's avatar has been replaced by the high-tech campus, where things are not made manually but digitally, keystroke by keystroke. Still, we are very much products of the age of the factory.
Factories are the product of a bundle of colliding economic, labor, technological, political, environmental, architectural, and social imperatives, but factories themselves are usually subordinated and subsumed within larger disciplines as a means to a scholarly end. It is Freeman's achievement to study the factory for itself and in itself, and to demonstrate how these various forces come together in the factory, in a history that spans three centuries and several continents. In telling this story Freeman chose to be selective rather than exhaustively comprehensive. He focuses on six case studies. In each chapter he writes not merely of factories but of the behemoths, those sprawling Brobdingnagian cynosures that seemed to epitomize each era's most advanced technologies. A labor historian by training, Freeman grounds his histories in the labor-management dynamics of the factory, the ravenous appetites of giant factories for labor, how factory owners sought to control their labor force, and how their workers resisted these efforts.
The book opens with a chapter on the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the growth of the first large-sized industrial factories, the cotton mills. In the mills Freeman finds patterns that would be replicated in all of his subsequent case studies. First comes the technological breakthrough. Next...