eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226663067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Flow, or Fixity in Motion:The Warehouse
Storage is subject to tidal movements of varying volume in the course of each year. Latitude, climate, seasons, social events, changes in style, customs, tastes, and manners all contribute to influence the demand for storing facilities. … There is what might be called a moving stock of goods earning an income for the establishment, but which remains in storage but a comparatively short time. On the other hand there is a permanent stock which remains on hand a comparatively long time. These two factors may be called, respectively, the flow and the fund. The flow corresponds to the transient guests at a hotel and the fund corresponds to the permanent guests of the hotel. It has been said that no hotel could be successful by relying wholly upon its permanent tenants for an income; that permanent guests serve to pay fixed charges, but transient guests must be relied upon to furnish the margin necessary for profits.
— Department of Commerce and Labor, Warehousing Industry in the United States (1903)
"Circulation Reservoirs"
During the violent summer of 1877, a twenty-five-year-old journalist and self-described "rustic visitor" traveled to the nation's busiest seaport to research an essay for Harper's. As strikers jammed railroads and battled militias from Maryland to Illinois, Ernest Ingersoll wandered the docks of New York. He inspected the piers, marveled at the cargo, and scribbled notes about the ships and their attendants, chiefly the longshoremen ("among the most ignorant and brutal of men") and the "human wharf rats" ("whose only idea of home is a coil of rope or a recess under a warehouse, whose business is to steal for junkmen, whose ambition is to become pirates").
Yet while this terrain impressed Ingersoll, it was indoors, in the "great caverns for the storage of goods," where the Michigan native found himself most captivated. "Cross the threshold and climb the stairways from one low-roofed loft to another," he beckoned, "and you wander among foreign fields and breathe the airs of every zone." Ingersoll drank in the scene. "Here are tier upon tier of hogsheads of sugar," he admired, "perspiring molasses with the memory of the Cuban sun." The rooms brimmed with "rows," "huge heaps," and "tall stacks" of organic matter. "Go upstairs now," Ingersoll urged his readers, "and look at the bales and casks stored to the roof-tree." Smell, taste, and "wipe your fingers on the clean matting bags of linseed sent all the way from Bombay for your convenience." Ingersoll savored the frisson of disorientation. "As you step out into the broad sunshine, and the heavy iron doors close behind you, you feel as though you were just landing after years of foreign travel, and you bear about with you for many hours the aroma of the tropics."
An accompanying engraving enhanced the drama of this florid travelogue (fig. 1.2). With a strong vertical axis, it drew viewers' eyes past the clerks and porters and along the center aisle into the chamber's "depths," an abyss of cosmopolitan anxieties and appetites. Where underwriters of fire insurance saw catastrophe in this grid of timber pillars and floorboards, overwriters like Ingersoll spied a portal to exotic lands. The edging of the engraving suggested a proscenium arch, theatrically telescoping the earth's manifold riches onto a city street. "Cross the threshold," the composition invited, and step onto far-away continents.
For those of us accustomed to tales of high-tech wizardry at Amazon fulfillment centers and Walmart distribution centers, Ingersoll is a fitting guide to the public perception of the warehouse in the period of its debut. He typifies the tendency that prevailed in the late nineteenth century (and that stubbornly persists) to regard the warehouse as akin to a museum. Sniffing and sampling and labeling, he was every inch the naturalist trained by Louis Agassiz at Harvard University in comparative zoology (and scientific racism). Outside, streetcars rattled, elevators rumbled, and modernity hurtled forward; inside, time stood still, and accreted. "Upon these warehouse floors," he declared, "is written a history of our commerce."
Ingersoll's Edenic tomb is both so familiar and so wrong. Ingersoll was no warehouseman. Such an inert portrayal of cargo would have horrified an entrepreneur who preferred for a majority of the items under his roof to behave like "the transient guests at a hotel." No, a warehouseman would have nominated another homology: the reservoir. Like the warehouse, the reservoir was a space of circulation, and dialectically so: it was a space of interrupted circulation. Unlike the human body — the more popular analogy for circulation — the reservoir was a holding bin. The human body failed to measure up as a medium of storage. Blood should not collect in pools.
The links between the reservoir and the warehouse were as literal in the late nineteenth-century American city as they were metaphorical. They overlapped so much that they shared plumbing. Water from reservoirs was pumped underground to warehouses, helping firemen douse flames and warehousemen lower insurance rates. In an early example, the manager of a Manhattan warehouse "effected one grand hydraulic insurance upon all the merchandise" when he arranged for "the Croton water to be introduced in a large pipe upon every floor of the building." So fierce was the water pressure that there was no commodity "with a combustibility too rapid for the Croton to quench." The source of the "Croton water" was the Croton Aqueduct (the largest one in the world when it was completed in 1842), via a reservoir at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Adjacent to brownstones, this reservoir — a stone megalith that mimicked an Egyptian pyramid — even resembled a warehouse (fig. 1.3).
Nevertheless, few spoke of it as an aquatic "storehouse." Warehousemen were correct to refer to warehouses as "reservoirs" because the French word reservoir meant "storehouse." But fluidity was associated with reservoirs and not warehouses in the vernacular of capitalism during the Gilded Age. As surpluses in the sphere of production triggered chronic crises in the sphere of distribution, a new cadre of statisticians monitored "reservoirs of goods." By 1903, this usage was so conventional that the US Department of Commerce and Labor characterized the nation's nascent warehousing industry as "a nexus of reservoirs, accumulating stocks in seasons of maximum supply and feeding the demand of tributary sections of the country as the periodical requirements of the community arise." A warehouse was a spatio-temporal apparatus for modulating flows of capital.
It may seem needlessly antiquarian to trot out this etymology, since the purpose of a warehouse may seem manifestly self-evident: ware + house. Warehousemen, though, felt hampered by this common sense. Born after the Civil War, after the transportation revolution, they found themselves occupying a new category within the social division of labor. The warehouse was no storehouse, they came to believe, as they shaped it and it shaped them. It was something new altogether, much like the commodities exchanges it attended. Until the years after World War I they struggled to distinguish warehousing from storing.
"Struggled," moreover, is the perfect verb to capture what was happening in this realm, even though struggle was muted if not markedly absent in representations of the warehouse. In written descriptions and visual portraits, goods in storage appeared motionless, as if boulders in the currents of capitalism. Take the photograph from a warehouse at the nation's first foreign-trade zone (fig. 1.1): its crisp lines demarcate less a quantity than a quality of stock, with the rows of boxes and crates arrayed so rigidly that they might as well be bolted to the floor. Yet as an astute observer of capitalism, Karl Marx, once noted, "This apparent stagnation" was in fact "a form of the flow itself." And struggle was a constant in that dynamic. This chapter chronicles the nineteenth-century rise of the warehouse — what Marx called a "circulation reservoir"— and then audits how it added up. I profile the warehouseman as a merchant of flow, demonstrating how he siphoned the flow of commodities and profited off of blockages, so long as he absorbed the flow of "handling labor" that puddled at his feet.
"Storage Is Civilization"
Any inventory of the warehouse in the United States must begin by stressing its historical novelty. Only a decade before the Civil War did it emerge in mercantile centers as a stand-alone business, and only during the Gilded Age did it register as a destination on the cognitive maps of city denizens. This periodization is itself an argument, since warehousing is too often called "one of the oldest businesses in the world." To grasp what was sui generis about the warehouse, first we need to set aside this canard about its primeval stature.
The claim that the warehouse is as old as humankind has been rooted in the fact that human settlements have always depended on caloric reserves. Indeed by this logic "storage is civilization," as said an ad in Distribution & Warehousing in 1922 (fig. 1.4). "Primitive man ate his food where he killed or plucked it," the ad notes. "Only when he stored a surplus … did he find freedom from hunger for a long enough time to devote himself to the thought and arts that raised him above the brutes." A meal of fresh-caught rabbit was a mark of savagery, a meal of smoked salmon a badge of cultivation. The gravitas of this parable was visualized by a lack of visuals: the text was styled like a royal scroll decreeing the warehouseman's transhistorical stewardship of human prosperity.
But this timeline was no more than a jingle. Warehousing was decades young in 1922, and it was not reducible to storing. What was truly informative about this ad was that it testified to the existence of a bona fide industry, implying that the warehouse had achieved sufficient critical mass to warrant an origin story. Three years later, this reach was confirmed by the publication of the foremost treatise on warehousing, Warehousing: Trade Customs and Practices, Financial and Legal Aspects. Armchair expert H. A. Haring's 787-page volume revealed not only the scope and intricacy of the political economy of "warehousing" but also the maturation of what Haring called the industry's "self-consciousness."
The rareness of Haring's study is meaningful for our purposes. To reconstruct the rise of the warehouse, we have to historicize how warehousemen historicized themselves — a job left to them because scholars virtually ignored them. In 1900, when the American Warehousemen's Association canvassed several leading libraries for holdings on warehousing, the Boston Public Library topped the list, "with three volumes, one of these a French work, another a copy of the law, and the other an essay on warehousing bearing the date 1829." With such paltry offerings, warehousemen had to write themselves into the record under their own bylines and via commission. A gem of this archive is a seven-part "History of the Warehouse" that ran in Distribution & Warehousing from 1922 to 1924. Authored by a Manhattan-based historian for hire named H. H. Manchester, whose forte was "historical copy" for advertising, the series stands out for both its wealth of information and its assertion of selfhood on the part of the warehouseman.
Manchester's oeuvre covered a variety of spatial forms: the garden, the safety deposit vault, the warehouse. We might think of his method as archaeological. In excavating a site, he alternated between its physical trappings and its intellectual moorings — between the landscape of the garden and the idea of the garden, the architecture of the warehouse and the idea of the warehouse. These essays were erudite. Manchester researched them extensively, often mentioning "the records," and peppering sentences with phrases like "we find notice of."
In this series, Manchester discusses two types of warehouses. The more prevalent is the depository: "a public place in which to deposit goods for safekeeping." Preservation is the essence of the depository, and the reason why the warehouse is often deemed a stagnant vault. Drawings of the tombs in Egyptian pyramids prove for Manchester that "the story of the warehouse begins practically with the dawn of civilization."
The second type of warehouse is the depot. More similar to a shelter than a charnel house, the depot safeguards goods in transit, stowing them prior to their transfer to other vehicles, whether from ship to rail or rail to wagon. Hence the name for the first generation of warehouse businesses: "The [family or place] Storage and Transfer Company." Manchester finds depots throughout the annals of commerce, though he stresses that they proliferated during the Middle Ages and early modern period as the Italian and Hanseatic merchant empires extended as far as "the ends of what may be called the tentacles of civilization, carrying the manufactured products of Europe into distant lands, and drawing from them the raw products or merchandise peculiar to that district."
Manchester's depository/depot binary captures quite lucidly two of the core aims of warehousing, but he omits a third, vexing term: factory. Before denoting a wool mill or clock manufactory, "factory" referred to a trading post, or what Manchester would term a depot. Merchants — "factors" — established factories to broker deals. In English, etymologically, these factories first surfaced on the West African coast, where British factors purchased captives with "fetishes" and detained them in seaside "factories," prior to shipping them across the Atlantic in floating warehouses. These factories fused circulation and production, converting the storage of human beings into "the harvest of raw material and the manufacture of goods," in the words of the cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman. "The very word 'factory,'" Hartman notes, "documents the indissoluble link between England's industrial revolution and the birth of human commodities." Writing when survivors of slavery were still alive, Manchester whitewashed the warehouse by segregating it from the slave trade.
As a result of this sort of erasure, "warehousing" has come to be understood as unconcerned with people, not because warehouses have not hosted people, but because commerce has been presumed to stop short of trafficking in people: one of the most resilient reconstructions of capitalism after 1865 has been to redraw this line around what is saleable, what is available to commodify as property. Thus when activists have referred to mass incarceration as "human warehousing"— a motif of protest literature since the 1960s — the term has reverberated jarringly because, allegedly, "warehousing" has not touched the "human." Like "child labor" for Progressive Era reformers, "human warehousing" has served as a monstrous compound to mark a social boundary.
Within this schema, to return to Manchester's typology, there were two basic reasons for the advent of warehousing: the quest for subsistence, or hunger; and the quest for accumulation, or greed. And hunger preceded greed, by an order of thousands of years. In the cradle of civilization, Manchester contends, warehousing sustained the commons. Its role was, as the saying goes, "to save for the time of plenty until the time of need." What eventually repurposed warehousing into an industry — whether of depositories or depots — was the subsumption of storage to the profit motive. This shift is what is dodged by figure 1.4. While we can dig up artifacts of the practice of warehousing from as far back as the pharaohs, we cannot identify the enterprise of warehousing until much more recently.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Out of Stock"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: “My Brain Hurt Like a Warehouse”Chapter One: Flow, or Fixity in Motion: The Warehouse
Chapter Two: Security and Securitization: The Bonded Warehouse
Chapter Three: Imperium in Imperio: The Freihafen, the Zollverein, and the Empire of Logistics
Chapter Four: What We Talk about When We Talk about Manufacturing: The Foreign-Trade Zone
Chapter Five: “Plant Your Plant at a Home Away from Home, at Home”: The Subzone
Conclusion: Free Shipping!
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index