In the most basic terms, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World is a story about industries which grew their operations thanks to factories and the impact those industries had on people, working conditions, communities, and the environment. Joshua Freeman takes the reader on a journey starting from the eighteenth century Great Britain cotton and iron production facilities, through the showcase factory giants of nineteenth and twentieth century (in the United States, the USSR, Soviet satellite countries, and Western Europe), and ends it with the hypergigantism of the twenty-first century Chinese manufacturing centres.
Joshua Freeman examines the growth of factories together with the social development associated with that growth. He examines the role that factories (and industrial urbanism) played in social and cultural transformation in Germany, Hungary, and Poland (including the birth and struggle of the Solidarity movement); China (where the mass mobilisation of the 1950s caused shortages in agriculture leading to a famine and where, more recently, the Foxconn factory scandal emerged), Vietnam, Egypt (including the Arab Spring changes), and a few other places. He interrogates how a relatively new social phenomenon of factories influenced the social, political, and economic sphere of lives in countries where factories were built over the last three centuries.
Even though it is not a book that is targeted at business ethicists, it highlights several problems that lie in the heart of debates on business ethics, i.e., topics of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate citizenship. People who might benefit from reading this book would be interested in the emerging sociology of morality, business history, and business ethics. Also, this book can be a valuable resource to students discussing historical accounts relating to factories, actions of workers, and businesspeople.
Freeman recognises unethical business activities of those who established and ran specific factories from the eighteenth century onwards. Correspondingly, Behemoth is a well-researched chronicle of the lives of factory workers and working conditions created by manufactories. It presents a compelling account of the social costs associated with the growth of the manufacturing industry and large-scale factories. For example, immigration affected the workforce, as a steady and uninterrupted stream of unskilled workers allowed manufacturers to maintain extended hours and dangerous conditions for employees. Freeman also summarises conditions created by mass industrialisation. This process had, for example, a huge side effect on the Soviet peasantry, as the social change was facilitated at the expense of agricultural workers. It occurred when basic goods and food were exported to pay for factory equipment and machinery. That led to the malnutrition and even starvation of Soviet workers.
Interestingly, factories grew out of technical and financial considerations. Manufactories allowed for the production of goods under one roof. Initially, in most places during the eighteenth century, factory spaces were not utilised in full, and factory owners rented the space to local artisans to generate more income. Additionally, some of the production was simultaneously happening in factories and private houses of craftspeople. Nonetheless, with new technological advancements of production processes, only closed and supervised locations like factories safeguarded a collection of patent royalties for using licensed machines and technologies. So, most large-scale production ended up in factories, as the collection of levies was feasible in confined and stable manufacturing conditions.
Behemoth contributes to the literature by looking at specific matters relevant to business ethicists. Most of the subjects are analysed at the meso and macro level. Freeman shows how industries and states were affected when the technological change occurred, and some technological advancements became available. He elaborates on various levels of governance, as some states used factories for social advancement in both capitalist and socialist countries. In those situations, some states themselves acted as enterprises in establishing specific factories (i.e., the USSR).
At the micro level, Freeman uses specific people and their lives and professional stories to narrate some of the periods of factory development (e.g., Francis Cabot Lowell, or Henry Ford) or specific problems (highlighted by Margaret Bourke-White, Charles Sheeler, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Maxim Gorky, or Charlie Chaplin) to discuss technological advancements, perceptions of manufactures, factory work, and mass production.
In his historical account of the development of modern factories, Freeman does not refrain from discussing controversial subjects. For example, without using the term “theft” directly, he described an appropriation of the Italian cotton production technology by British manufacturers in the eighteenth century. Contemporarily, we would brand such actions as intellectual property theft, patent theft, or copyright infringement. It is understandable why one would avoid calling such actions by name, as doing so would mean that so much of the Industrial Revolution was based upon the theft of someone else’s technological innovation. Today, these same European states that were involved in that “technological transfer” pride themselves for being technologically innovative and in support of patents and other forms of technological protections. That account shows how the perception of these matters has changed over time.
Behemoth opens up a conversation on the working environment in factories at specific times and places. It describes accounts ranging from overregulation represented by the military discipline to anomie, where due to social circumstances factory workers had no local family ties. In that context, an idea of panopticism (propagated by Michel Foucault, relating to internal surveillance) and its introduction in factories is also discussed. Constant observation, supervision, and discipline was a key factor affecting working conditions. Different forms of social regulation and moral policing were employed for that purpose. For example, discipline inside and outside of the North American factories was enforced using low-interest loans in adjacent towns. Such a setup made workers more obedient to a moral code of conduct as its transgression could lead to losing a job and therefore their house as a potential result of that job loss. Similarly, Freeman discusses the corrupting influence of wealth on the political and social life of people in specific towns that were built to accommodate specific factories. Freeman notes that these towns were constructed to secure the retention of workers, to make sure that factory operations would remain uninterrupted and to create additional income for factory owners.
One of the main strengths of this book relates to how Freeman evokes relevant social and economic theories (by discussing, for example, work by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and Daniel Bell). On many occasions, while discussing specific events in the developments of factories, the author explores specific beliefs known at that time. These include ideas associated with progress and modernity, such as surveillance or factory tourism, which sparked a widespread fascination with factories and modern production processes and an idealisation of steel production by direct reference to the Promethean revolution.
Similarly, this book features some activities of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs who used fairs and exhibitions to further their business enterprises by creating false impressions. As in Freeman’s view, fairs and technical exhibitions played an essential role in selling an idea of factories as an extension of the modernisation process. Workers (and the public as a pool of potential workers) needed to buy into that idea to fully cooperate with factory owners and managers. Thus, the creation of narratives favourable to factory owners had the potential to create unfavourable working conditions. That is because workers (who fully internalised that idea) and their rights became subservient to the ideal of social progression embodied by factories. The social pressure created in that way to sustain the progress of modernisation could potentially cause a violation of working conditions and as a result of workers’ rights.
One of the shortcomings of Behemoth relates to the way information is provided in the first part of the book. In reporting the history of factories, Freeman sometimes jumps from one historical account to the next without keeping the chronology of events. Too often such a change in storytelling is not well signalled, and shifts between descriptions of different times and spaces can be confusing to the reader. In these cases the reader is left struggling with fragmented historical narratives and has to supplement information elsewhere. Such a way of structuring historical accounts affects the communication of ideas and retention of information. It is hard for readers to recreate relevant people’s experiences and related historical background when a sequence of events is interrupted or inconsequential. Also, from the point of view of business ethicists, this book consists of information (for instance, the detailed description of production processes of cotton or iron) that might not be relevant at first sight. Nonetheless, these details supplement the overall picture and understanding of social conditions, which are discussed in this book.
Behemoth showcases how deeply engraved factories are in social lives and contemporary societies, and what effect some factories had on the development of social and national identities. This book is not a straightforward account of, or applause for, factories. It challenges the view that history consists of uninterrupted growth of factories, which created conditions of continuous social growth. Also, it rebalances the predominant view in the collective consciousness of linear growth and progression associated with the Industrial Revolution. It is noted that some concepts like Fordism, Taylorism, and the idea that factories are part of our daily lives are sometimes over-romanticised. Overall, Freeman extends the debate on the development of factories beyond the well-known narrative of the constant progression, improvement, and implementation of freedom. He connects it with social conditions of specific periods and contextualises it within those debates on what so many see as progression. It is not an attempt to redesign those long-standing debates; it is an attempt to supplement them with a more balanced account that considers social, economic, and environmental consequences.
This book focuses not only on the factories, but also on most aspects of the gigantism of those constructions and their social effect on micro, meso, and macro scales. Behemoth has a lot to offer to anyone interested in the subject. It is well-researched and based heavily on contemporary academic literature. Moreover, it can serve as a practical guide on some of the (business) patterns of behaviours in contemporary globalised societies. This book offers a suitably balanced account combining information on the global history of factories, social development of that time, and consequences on those who worked and lived nearby factories.
