Despite all the chatter about the “post-industrial society,” our world is factory built from the buildings where we dwell to the cell phones in our hands. Queens College history professor Joshua B. Freeman sets out the role factories played in the construction of modernity in Behemoth. Those smoking chimneys of the 19th century “visibly ushered in a new world,” became the handmaid of consumerism, the cause of widespread misery and prosperity, and the source of environmental ruin. Freeman’s lively account includes the crucial role played by American capitalists in building Soviet industry under Stalin and concludes with “Foxconn City,” a chapter that investigates the “sausage factory in which the meat of modernity was being produced, and the human cost of stylish and convenient gadgets.”
