That was as true in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe — before which only half of French children, plagued by hunger and disease, lived to see the age of 20 — as it is now in Ethiopia, where the producers of Ivanka Trump’s shoes recently relocated from Dongguan, China, chasing a more desperate work force content to work for a pittance (roughly $30 a month) rather than paying the rising wages of their predecessors in China ($560).

Capitalism, naturally, takes advantage of such increasingly swift and secretive moves. It was the striving capitalists, after all, who pioneered the world’s initial giant factories — first among them a British wigmaker named Richard Arkwright who patented his spinning machine in 1768, then created an empire of steam-powered cotton mills. Arkwright knew he had arrived when he was able to lend the Duchess of Devonshire 5,000 pounds to pay down her gambling debts, even if he and his fellow mill owners used laborers as young as 7 years old.

Freeman dips into a delicious expanse of source material from Charles Dickens to Karl Marx to Tim Cook, from Bloomberg Businessweek to The National Rip-Saw. In roughly chronological order, British silk mill owners give way to the Boston barons who developed the factory town of Lowell, Mass., in 1822, building dorm-style housing for the out-of-town farmers’ daughters they hired and innovating a standardized production process that bested the British and would “morally uplift” via such utopian amenities as company-sponsored libraries and potted plants.

The wealthy Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell not only figured out how to churn out white sheeting more efficiently — the fabric used to make slaves’ clothing — but he was also the brains behind the radical innovation of the stockholder corporation. Before Lowell, that model was rare, usually reserved for public works, not the accumulation of private wealth.

Freeman loops around the globe nimbly, drawing parallels between the farmers’ daughters who sent money home from Lowell and the Chinese migrants who do the same from Guangdong almost two centuries later. Though I wish he would have lingered longer on the workers’ lives, he has a sharp eye for the raw, gut-kicking detail. A riveter in the Urals freezes to death on a scaffolding. Middle managers in Michigan have to learn the words for “hurry up” in English, German, Polish and Italian to keep Henry Ford’s assembly line humming along.

As he does with Diego Rivera’s industry-worshiping murals in Detroit, Freeman’s mini-portrait of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White shows how the public came to view manufacturing through her factory-fanatic lens, from Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich., to Stalin’s giant tractor factory in a former melon field. With Henry Ford’s top architect, Albert Kahn, as their consultant, the Soviets squeezed wealth out of the countryside on the road to creating a socialist society after an initial epic fail. “The Russians have no more idea how to use the conveyor than a group of schoolchildren,” Freeman quotes Bourke-White saying. “One Russian is screwing in a tiny bolt and 20 other Russians are standing around him watching, talking it over, smoking cigarettes, arguing.”

Image Credit... Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

But the Russians eventually figured out how to make manufacturing advance both their socialist culture and their economy, inspiring the East Europeans, all of whom later inspire Taiwanese and Hong Kong businessmen setting up Chinese government-backed shops in Shenzhen and Guangdong.