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Tim Harford charts the history of the factory, from "dark, Satanic mills" to the sprawling industrial parks where today's consumer goods are assembled. Have factories made workers' lives better - and what does their future look like?

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9 minutes

Last on

Mon 8 Jul 2019 03:50GMT

Image credit

Workers in the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, in southern China's Guangdong province, pictured in May 2010 (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Sources

听Justin Corfield 鈥淟ombe, John鈥 in Kenneth E. Hendrickson III The Encyclopaedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p568.

听Joshua Freeman Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World WW Norton: London 2018 pp1-8

Adam Smith An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations 1776听

Picture the Past 鈥 Belper Round Mill听

The life and adventure of Michael Armstrong, the factory boy听

Bill Cahn Mill Town Cameron and Kahn: New York 1954听

Friedrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England 1845听

Daniel Wren and Arther Bedeian 鈥淭he Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality鈥 International Journal of Social Economics 31 (3) (2004) cited in Freeman Behemoth pp174-175. See also Stephen Kotkin Magnetic Mountain University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1997; Loren Graham The Ghost of the Executed Engineer Harvard University Press: Cambridge 1996听

Myself included: Tim Harford The Undercover Economist (Oxford University Press, New York 2005). For a detailed account of conditions for women in Chinese factories see Pun Ngai Made In China Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2005. An intriguing study of Ethiopian factories is summarised by Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon 鈥淓verything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong鈥 The New York Times 27 April 2017.

Wolfgang Streeck 鈥淭hrough Unending Halls鈥 The London Review of Books Vol. 41 No. 3 路 7 February 2019 pages 29-31听

Charles Babbage On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures London: Charles Knight 1832 (Reprinted Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2009)听

鈥 31 January 2019 and Richard Baldwin The Great Convergence Harvard University Press 2016

Broadcasts

  • Sat 6 Jul 2019 04:50GMT
  • Sat 6 Jul 2019 13:50GMT
  • Sun 7 Jul 2019 14:50GMT
  • Sun 7 Jul 2019 21:50GMT
  • Sun 7 Jul 2019 22:50GMT
  • Mon 8 Jul 2019 03:50GMT

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