Henry Snow, US Labour and economic historian, reminds us that he idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother Samuel, who fascinated by shipbuilding, undertook a high-level apprenticeship in the late 18^th century that equipped him with “both a trademan’s knowledge and bourgeois European science”.

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 notorious Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they come 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 Regan. Extending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives.

Blending intellectual, economic, and labour history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history. How common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged, Henry Snow reveals and traces this thread of top-down managerial control from the salve plantations of Caribbean (“a laboratory for capitalism”), via the Benthams, to the digital panopticons of Amazon’s present day “fulfilment centres”, where centralised data architecture does the same job that Samuel and Jeremy sought to design into shipyards and prisons:”Through scanners and logistics system, the company surveils workers’ time down to the minute.”

Control Science, reveals one-sided case that wealthy elites, including factory owners, philosophers, economists and ideologues, have over centuries conspired with their managers to suggest that “there is no alternative” to market fundamentalism. “This is a lie” Snow’s introduction is critical.

Alfred Sloan, architect of General Motors’ mid-20 century success and Jack Welch CEO of General Electric until 2001. Snow mentions pioneering potteries factory-owner Josiah Wedgwood “with lot more humanity, wished to use aritsans like machines rather than negotiate with them as people”; co-author of Freakonomics Steven Levitt, and even anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, lauded recently by the historian Rutger Bregman, no friend of capital, for his attempts to “make goodness fashionable”, turns out to have been an ardent fan of the Benthams’ Panopticon.

Snow writes, “Together we can suspend tis game, refuse  to fight, decide what is too much, pull the red handle”.

Snow explains early consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor’s obsession with the principles of “scientific management”, which were all the rage in the early 1900s.  Taylor ran time-and-motion studies to worker productivity but he supposedly empirically proven benefits of his work were largely a sham. Snow points out rapid industrialisation of late 19^th century Japan, that there were alternatives to the “Survival of the Fittest” approach that inspired Victorian competitive capitalism.

Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World by Henry Snow, Verso £22/$29.95 , 152 pages.