A01=Henry Snow
Adam Tooze
Amazon
Author_Henry Snow
capitalism
Category=JHBL
Category=NHTB
economic history
economics
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Freakonomics
geopolitics
history of capital
intellectual history
labour
political science
Quinn Slobodian
Russia
slavery
strikes
technology
theory
UK
union
USA
Product details
- ISBN 9781804293201
- Weight: 511g
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 12 May 2026
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers-and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and the global economy.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Extending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Extending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged.
Henry Snow is a labor historian who has taught at Colby College and the University of Connecticut. They publish the newsletter Another Way.
