Fire and brimstone

Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we know what to expect. The ugly buildings. The dull work of the shop floor. The worker reduced to a mere fleshy extension of a machine, his existence condensed into a series of jerks, twists and spasms. A life at best eroded by monotony — an eternal inhabitant of Dickens’s Coketown, ‘to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart to the last and the next’ — or at worst snatched up and tossed onto the sacrificial flames of Fritz Lang’s modern ‘Moloch’ of the 1927 epic, Metropolis. They are places either too boring or too bleak to be of interest. But try to think of five things you use daily that weren’t made in one.

For most of their history, factories were at the centre of an important debate: what the future would look like. They were photographed, painted and written about. The world had dreams and nightmares over them. Theirs was the power to forge different classes, advance a nation and allow exclusive luxuries to be made widely available. Joshua B. Freeman argues that this debate over the future came to a head in a series of Behemoths — giant factories which captivated and shaped the world, employing the most, building the biggest, aiming the highest.

The numbers quoted by Freeman are off the scale. They make the reader, and everything he knows, feel uncomfortably small. The Chinese manufacturer Foxconn employed around 400,000 workers at its peak at the beginning of this century — almost the entire population of Edinburgh. Even back in 1906, the US steel mill in Gary, Indiana spanned 14 times the area of the City of London. Henry Ford’s Press Shop was just one building at his River Rouge complex in Michigan, but was big enough to fit four Palaces of Westminster inside.