Four decades after the first predictions of “post-industrial society,” industrial factories have once again returned to Americans’ collective consciousness. Where they once symbolized power, pride, and progress, they are now icons of decline: jobs lost, communities decimated, a period of prosperity that turned out to be all too brief. In the American Midwest and in pockets across Europe, voters who once supported left-leaning parties have increasingly turned to candidates who promise industrial revival wrapped in ethnonationalism.

BEHEMOTH: A HISTORY OF THE FACTORY AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD by Joshua B. Freeman W. W. Norton & Company, 448 pp., $27.95

It’s hard to imagine that these voters are longing for the conditions that most factory workers today are subjected to. In the new centers of industrial production—Mexico, China, and Vietnam among others—factory work utterly lacks the aura it had in mid-century America, and workers endure authoritarian conditions that recall a much earlier period. Meanwhile, many sectors in the United States now subject their employees to industrial-style discipline. The warehouses of companies like Lidl and Amazon combine hyper-regulated, mentally and physically exhausting work with ruthless metrics and pitiable pay. Jobs in “knowledge work”—hailed by many social theorists in the middle of the twentieth century as a bright future—have largely proved a disappointment, since knowledge workers, too, are tightly controlled, with none of industrial work’s dignified pay and union protection.

The new romance of the factory is more likely based on the sense of dignity and purpose that unionized workers gained in factory jobs. It is unsurprising that some Americans would be nostalgic for a period when they could more easily place themselves in a history of progress as the heirs to a heroic struggle for an improved working-class lot. As Amy Goldstein has poignantly illustrated in her book Janesville: An American Story, when factories close, an entire world collapses—a source of self-worth, a basis of solidarity and trust. Many of the laid-off General Motors workers in Janesville, Wisconsin hated the work they spent most of their days performing. But the factory—and the whole network of factories it sustained—contained memories of personal independence, friendships, political solidarity, company game days and picnics, connection to previous generations, and a strong economic basis for participation in family and community life.

In Behemoth: The History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, labor historian Joshua B. Freeman sets out to explore the complex economic and cultural story of how factories became entangled with the idea of progress, “how and why giant factories became carriers of dreams and nightmares associated with industrialization and social change.” An effortless and engaging guide, Freeman embarks on a tour of the last three centuries, in which the factory played a defining role in world history. By combining economic, labor, and cultural history, he aims to explain the intellectual and emotional power that industrialism exerted over a whole historical epoch, in which giant buildings full of giant machines came, for millions, to embody radical hopes of a completely transformed world.

Born in eighteenth-century Great Britain, the modern factory was immediately understood to herald a revolution. Its emergence generated what would become a familiar cycle of techno-economic hype answered by horrified social criticism and worker protest. The first factory opened in 1721 in Derby, England, where it wove silk on the River Derwent. It took nearly a century for the “factory system” to dominate the British economy, helped along by egregious abuses of labor: Its growth depended both on enslaved people in the Americas, who by the early nineteenth century produced 90 percent of the cotton that Britain’s factories processed, and on the exploitation of England’s rural, poor, orphan, and criminal populations, forced into the mills by the collective power of private industry and the state. Children worked daily shifts of at least twelve hours, and were beaten so that they would stay awake. With few political rights, workers resorted to what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot,” and “Luddites” broke machines they operated, in order to demand a say in their working conditions and payment (a tactic that would make them erroneously synonymous with technophobia).