The giant factory has left us with a complex legacy and many lessons. It demonstrated in practical, concrete ways the ability of humankind to exert mastery over nature (at least for a while), in the process vastly improving the standard of living for billions of people but also despoiling the earth. It illuminated the deep ties between coercion and freedom, exploitation and material advance. It revealed the beauty to be found not only in the natural world, but in the manmade world, in labor and its products. It demonstrated the deep yearning of working people for control over their lives and a degree of justice, as decade after decade, century after century, they launched struggles against exploiting employers and oppressive states, often against enormous odds. But perhaps, at this moment, the most important lesson of the giant factory is the one that is easiest to forget; that it is possible to reinvent the world. It has been done before, and it can be done again.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE work of generations of scholars, journalists, and writers who shared a fascination with big factories and their social and cultural importance. Their publications, cited in my notes, collectively represent a stupendous intellectual achievement, indispensable for understanding the past and present. I owe them all a great debt.
As I finished this study, at the same time that my father, Harold Freeman, reached his one-hundredth birthday, I realized how much his sensibility pervades it. Throughout his life he combined a deep interest in technical matters with a critical political stance and broad familiarity with European and American culture, a kind of Enlightenment outlook once common in the working-class milieu in which he grew up. I vividly remember him taking me along as a child on a work-related visit to a glass factory, watching a worker pull a still glowing-red Coke bottle off the line, stretching and twisting it with tongs for our amusement. In that bit of magic, I suspect, lies the origin of this project.
I have been fortunate to learn about the factory and its implications not only from scholars but from workers and unionists, too. My summer sojourn as an eighteen-year-old in a cosmetics factory opened my eyes to the dense human drama that takes place within the walls of a production site, the combination of boredom, pride, fatigue, and solidarity; the gossip, storytelling, and arguing; the differing experiences and beliefs rubbing against one another; the skills of work, survival, and maneuver that working women and men have to master. In the years since, in other jobs and in my work with the labor movement, I have been privileged to learn more about what the poet Philip Levine called “What Work Is.” I am grateful to the many labor activists and workers who, often without realizing it, enriched my understanding of toil, unionism, politics, and working-class life.
An embryonic version of this study appeared in the journal New Labor Forum as one of a series of columns I wrote with Steve Fraser under the heading “In the Rearview Mirror.” Steve came up with the idea of a column that looked at historic precedents for current events. His notion of how to link the past and the present sparked the idea for what became Behemoth, which I sometimes think of as one of our columns writ very large. The encouragement of my colleagues at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, who heard a lunchtime talk I gave on the history of giant factories, convinced me the subject was worth pursuing further. Brian Palmer pushed me along when he suggested I submit a version of that talk for publication in Labour/Le Travail, the lively, sophisticated journal, of which he was the long-time editor.
A year-long fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York made possible research for this book. I am greatly thankful to its director, Donald Robotham, and my fellow fellows for a remarkably stimulating and fruitful year. Additional support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.
Mark Levinson from the Service Employees International Union and Cathy Feingold from the AFL-CIO, along with Robert Szewczyk and Dorota Miklos from NSZZ Solidarność, helped arrange my meeting with Solidarity union leaders in Nowa Huta. Stanisław Lebiest, Roman Natkonski, Krysztof Pfister, and their colleagues (with able translation by Piotr Smreczynski) were extraordinarily generous in devoting their time to discussing the history of the plant and their union and giving me a tour of the mill. May Ying Chen and Ruting Chen from the Murphy Institute and Lu Zhang from Temple University made extensive efforts to arrange a visit to Chinese factories. Though in the end the trip proved impossible, I deeply appreciate their attempts and the great deal I learned from them about China.
Many others helped along the way. Early on, Carol Quirke gave me valuable suggestions for reading about industrial photography. Dave Gillespie, John Thayer, and Maayan Brodsky provided research assistance. Josh Brown was extraordinarily generous in helping me with illustrations, sharing his incomparable knowledge of nineteenth-century graphics and personally scanning images to make sure they came out right. My students at Queens College put up with good humor my use of them as guinea pigs for many of the ideas in this book, in a global history course that focused on factories and industrialization. Daniel Esterman accompanied me on a research trip to Lowell and engaged in numerous discussions of this project as it unfolded, providing a sounding board and many good ideas. I also talked about factories on repeated occasions with Edgar Masters, whose long career in the textile industry and efforts to preserve industrial sites have made him a repository of information and insight.
I am especially grateful to colleagues who read drafts of chapters about places I was writing about for the first time: Timothy Alborn (chapter 1), Kate Brown (chapter 5), and Xiaodan Zhang (chapter 7). Their expertise and advice proved invaluable, even when my interpretations differed from theirs. These chapters are much improved as a result of their generosity. Jack Metzgar once again became an unflagging supporter as I worked on this book, reading every chapter in draft, providing detailed comments, and, most importantly, reassuring me that I was on to something when my doubts swelled. No one could ask for a more generous colleague and friend.
Steve Fraser was there at the end, just as he was at the beginning, reading the full manuscript and responding as I have come to take for granted, with comments both detailed and sweeping, raising historical questions and seeing connections I missed and making suggestions for structural changes that greatly strengthened the narrative. His friendship and our collaboration over the years have been enormously important to me. Kim Phillips-Fein put aside other things to read the first chapters of the manuscript as I approached the finish line, helping clarify and deepen them.
Nearly two decades ago, Matt Weiland edited a book I wrote and it was a terrific experience. The opportunity for a reprise has been one of the pleasures of this project. Once again, Matt got right away what I was trying to do, encouraging me to be bolder and more expansive, combining a sense of adventure with some necessary realism. Remy Cawley shepherded me through the publication process with good cheer, good advice, and a remarkable ability to keep track of never-ending details. I want to thank as well William Hudson, for his copyediting; Brian Mulligan, for the beautiful design of the book; and everyone at W. W. Norton for their extraordinary professionalism.
Finally, I want to thank my family for their love and support, especially my partner through the many years, Deborah Ellen Bell, who among many other things read the manuscript for this book and provided her usual good advice, and our wonderful daughters, Julia Freeman Bell and Lena Freeman Bell.
Notes
Introduction
1.Most manufacturing jobs are in factories, but not all. Some are in retail establishments, like bakeries, or even in homes. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment, Hours and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National),” http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet (accessed Sept. 24, 2016).
2.Heather Long, “U.S. Has Lost 5 Million Manufacturing Jobs Since
2000,” CNN Money, Mar. 29, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/29/news/economy/us-manufacturing-jobs/; The World Bank, World Data Bank, “Employment in Industry and World Development Indicators” (based on International Labour Organization data), http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS, and http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SL.IND.EMPL.ZS&country= (accessed Sept. 24, 2016); Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2017 (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), 179.
3.For life on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, see Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) (French life expectancy, 90), and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 22–43. See also Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 292; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71–72; and Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, 2017, 303, 895, 943.
4.Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013), 23–37; Marshall Berman, “Dancing with America: Philip Roth, Writer on the Left,” New Labor Forum 9 (Fall–Winter 2001), 53–54.
5.“modern, adj. and n.” and “modernity, n.” OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120618 (accessed September 17, 2016); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 208–09; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in M. Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
6.Size can be measured in different ways. I have defined it by number of employees. As a labor historian, that seems natural, coming from an interest in the lived experience of workers and class relations. There are other useful ways to define scale that would lead to the selection of a different set of factories to study. If we were to look at the size of factory buildings, in the current era the massive aircraft factories of Boeing and Airbus would rise to the fore, huge structures that go on and on but have within them fewer workers than many more compact plants. To understand the ecological impact of large factories, we might define size by the acreage of the sites on which production facilities are located. By that standard, chemical plants and, especially, atomic-fuel and weapons complexes exceed in size most of the factories discussed in this book. My definition of size is somewhat arbitrary, but it serves well the focus of this study on the linkage between the factory and modernity.
7.Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), and Nina Rappaport, Vertical Urban Factory (New York: Actar, 2016) are exceptions, but are heavily architectural in their tilt.
Chapter 1
“LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”
1.Prior to 1721, only a few British industries had centralized production facilities and these, by later standards, were quite small, like the Nottingham framework knitting workshops that employed several dozen workers apiece. In Central and Western Europe, there were a few large-scale, unmechanized manufacturing operations. Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 212; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. II (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 329–38. U.S. figure calculated from 1850 census data in U.S. Census Office, Manufacturers of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1865), 730.
2.The Derby silk mill is generally considered the first factory in England, the pioneer in the Industrial Revolution. There were at least a few earlier production facilities that had some if not all the characteristics of modern factories, including the sixteenth-century silk mills in Bologna, which developed some of the machinery and organization that the Lombes later copied. Anthony Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill: An Exercise in Reconstruction,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI, 1 (Autumn 1993), 82, 86.
3.Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 89; William Henry Chaloner, People and Industries (London, Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1963), 14–15. An 1891 fire destroyed most of the building, which was reconstructed on a smaller scale. It now houses the Derby Silk Mill museum.
4.S. R. H. Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production in the British Silk Industry, 1700–1870,” Journal of Economic History XLVII (1987), 75; Chaloner, People and Industries, 9–18; Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 87–88; R. B. Prosser and Susan Christian, “Lombe, Sir Thomas (1685–1739),” rev. Maxwell Craven, Susan Christian, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16956.
5.John Guardivaglio, one of the Italian workers who had come back with John Lombe, helped set up the mill near Manchester. Tram could be made from raw silk imported from Persia, easier to get than the higher-quality Italian or Chinese silk needed for organzine. Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 87, 96–97; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 202–03; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 77.
6.Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3rd. ed., vol. III (London: J. Osborn, 1742), 67; Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times ([1854] London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 7, 1.
7.James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. III (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1906), 121.
8.Though India was the most prominent center of cotton textile production, there were others, including Southeast Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and the Ottoman Empire, where artisans turned out imitations of Indian cottons. Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800,” 17–41, and Giorgio Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” 274, in The Spinning World: A Global history of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Riello and Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17–41.
9.Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 126; Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (1835; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 12.
10.D. T. Jenkins, “Introduction,” in D. T. Jenkins, The Textile Industries (Volume 8 of the Industrial Revolutions, ed. R. A. Church and E. A. Wrigley) (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), xvii; Riello, Cotton, 127.
11.Riello, Cotton, 172–73, 176; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 205.
12.Fustians were easier to produce than all-cotton fabric because flax warps were less likely than cotton to break during weaving.
13.Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles, 337–39; Riello, Cotton, 217, 219.
14.In the 1850s, the United States supplied 77 percent of the raw cotton imported by Britain, 90 percent by France, 92 percent by Russia, and 60 percent by the German states. Between 1820 and 1860 the number of slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, mostly growing cotton, rose from 101,878 to 768,357. R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830: A Study of the Early Factory System (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 347–48; Riello, Cotton, 188, 191, 195 (Marx quote), 200–207, 259; Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 197; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 243; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univers
ity Press, 2013), 256.
15.Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, [1835]), 11; R. L. Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, ‘Why Three Inventors?’ ” Textile History 10 (1979), 114–15.
16.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 115; Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78; David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 57. European commentators and historians long claimed that Indian wages were far below British ones, leading to lower prices for cotton products, but recently some historians have challenged this view. For a restatement of the orthodox position, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 64; for a reassessment suggesting near parity of wages, see Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35–46.
17.Jenkins, “Introduction,” x; Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History XXXII (1972), 241–61; S. D. Chapman, “Financial Restraints on the Growth of Firms in the Cotton Industry, 1790–1850,” Textile History 5 (1974), 50–69; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 182.
18.Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton,” 118–23; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 236; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 61–68, 76–78, 94–97; Adam Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent and Its Tributaries,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI (1) (Autumn 1993), 38.
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