University of Chicago Press Out of Stock – The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism

Review "Orenstein is the best possible guide for understanding the bureaucratic mazes behind warehousing because she is so effective at finding meaning in ideas that others might ignore."-- "Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era" "Orenstein's book provides an important contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of foreign trade zones and warehousing. . . . The book stands out for its dexterity with such a wide variety of subjects, methods, theories, and disciplines. Its sharp use of visual evidence is a particular delight, not merely illustrating main points, but making them. From advertising, film, architecture, and literature to government publications, corporate reports, policy revisions, and Congressional debates, it embodies the interdisciplinary approach one would hope for from an American studies scholar."-- "Planning Perspectives" "This book could not have been timelier. In a moment when the restricted mobility of much of the world's population has meant the inverse for the logistics industry, Dara Orenstein has given us a deeply impressive genealogy of the warehouse as spatial form. . . . Out of Stock draws on an array of federal and municipal archives and newspapers, as well as interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, especially from Marxist political economy, radical geography, and cultural theory."-- "Journal of Social History" "Full of interesting insights that will reward patient readers..."-- "Journal of Interdisciplinary History" "Recommended. The book is fascinating in its capacity to find the poetic in the prosaic."-- "Choice" "By focusing on the history of the warehouse, Orenstein has excavated the surprising historical origins of a crucial cog in contemporary capitalism, without which today's global supply chains and assembly lines would not be possible. Truly interdisciplinary and beautifully constructed, Out of Stock is a one-of-a-kind book."-- "Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago" "I want to thank Dara Orenstein for a wonderful exploration of modern political economy. Out of Stock is an unusually smart, highly engaged, and fittingly sophisticated account of capital's morphologies over the past two hundred years, composed, what's more, with an attention to style that reminds us that scholarship is as much a literary genre as an empirical effort, and that these can and should complement each other."-- "Michael Zakim, Tel Aviv University" "Orenstein's brilliant book must be read widely. Through meticulous research into the rise of special zones that allow offshore economic activity to take place within US territory, Orenstein challenges our most basic assumptions about national space and capitalist time, about the infrastructures of law and the border, and about violence. This landmark historical work offers tremendous empirical insight into conceptual questions at the center of contemporary debate."-- "Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto" Product Description In Out of Stock, Dara Orenstein delivers a nuanced, ambitious, and engrossing account of that most generic and underappreciated site in the history of American commerce and industry: the warehouse, and all its many permutations. She traces the progression from the bonded warehouse of the nineteenth century to today's foreign-trade zones, enclaves where goods are processed while simultaneously inside the US and outside US customs territory. Foreign-trade zones channel jobs to American workers by converting American cities into international ports, and to understand them, Orenstein tells us, we should look at them in the simplest of terms: as warehouses. Going further, Orenstein contends that these zones--nearly 800 of which are scattered across the US--are emblematic of how warehouses have begun to supplant factories on the terrain of logistics. In the age of Amazon and Walmart, circulation is so crucial to how and where goods are produced that it is increasingly inseparable from production, such that warehouses rank as s