Behemoth Quotes

“Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry,” wrote Karl Marx—an overstatement, but one with much truth.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

“The creation of the factory required exceptional ingenuity, obsession, and misery. We have inherited its miraculous productive power and long history of exploitation without giving it much thought.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

“The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again, it served as a measuring rod for attitudes toward work, consumption, and power, a physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares about the future.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

“In the large, theoretical literature on industrial location, labor rarely gets much attention. Differential wage rates are sometimes considered, but the presence or absence of militant workers and unions almost always is ignored.20 However, in practice, labor often was a key factor in corporate decision-making. One guidebook “for executives charged with evaluating the placement of a company’s productive capacity” frankly and matter-of-factly noted an “informal decision rule that some corporations follow is no plant which is unionized will be expanded on-site,” a dictum “grounded in management’s concern for maintaining productivity and flexibility at its facilities.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

“ruin porn.”
― Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World