Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism. By Dara Orenstein

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. In this case, to be more abstract is to get at the heart of the argument: Out of Stock investigates the evolution of economic zones “where the line between circulation and production has been drawn and redrawn—consciously and literally” (18). These zones temporarily halt the circulation of commodities to ensure that capital keeps flowing, extracting value from the work in and around warehouses. Orenstein investigates the evolution of these spaces from the warehouse, to the bonded warehouse, to the foreign-trade zone, to the contemporary subzone.

The first chapter historicizes the warehouse as modern reservoirs that modulate the flow of commodities. Modern warehouses appeared after the Civil War, though the warehousemen who ran them portrayed themselves as heirs to an ancient history of storage. Warehousemen distinguished themselves from merchants by commodifying space generally rather than storing one kind of commodity; they extracted profit through efficiency (i.e. reducing “nonproductive” handling work through mechanization and surveillance of workers). By the early 20^th century the American Warehousemen’s Association was strong enough to successfully lobby Congress to pass the Warehouse Act of 1916, giving the federal government the authority to license warehouses. The act created an opening for businesses during the Depression and World War II to use warehousing as an opportunity to get credit quickly. The warehouse became not only infrastructural to the landscape of the U.S., but to its financializing national economy.

But as discussed in the second chapter, the 19^th century also saw the rise of another innovation in storage, the bonded warehouse, which allowed importers to skirt duties while undergirding U.S. empire. To appease domestic manufactures fed up with customhouses, Congress passed the Warehousing Act of 1846, creating the country’s first warehouse system. Security was a high priority for the Treasury Department, which needed data to regulate these new bonded warehouses and prevent the “abstraction” (loss) of goods. Also important was the system’s mediation between the slave economy of the South and the wage labor economy of the North, necessitating intense surveillance of bonded goods. Congress approved the creation of bonded railroad routes in 1870, opening more opportunities to colonize the American West. This regionality reflected finance capital’s territoriality, which enclosed not only on goods but on people, too. Enslaved African Americans before the Civil War and Chinese laborers after, often transported as bonded people, turned to abstraction as a survival tactic, taking advantage of “a fugitivity that now characterized the commodity form, a provisional capacity for interruption of capital’s circuits and the nation-state’s limits” (102).

The next three chapters detail how zones and the cities in which they were formed came to shape the contemporary world economy. Orenstein expands on the territorial underpinnings of the warehouse system in the third chapter’s discussion of the freihafen (free ports, as in free from duties) and Zollverein (customs territory, or where customs authorities maintain jurisdiction), German concepts that American capitalists happily embraced. The free zone readjusted the nation-state’s customs jurisdiction over commodities rather than people, a peculiar type of extraterritoriality. After World War I, American companies gladly signed up with free ports overseas to increase their direct control over international distribution. At the urging of municipal port authorities, these zones arrived in the U.S. during the Great Depression. Importantly, Orenstein points to this moment as the beginning of the formation of the global assembly line rather than the capital flight of the immediate post-World War II years.

However, as Orenstein shows in the fourth chapter, foreign-trade zones in the U.S. sputtered for much of the 20^th century. Though zone operators were exuberant about the promise of using zones’ extraterritoriality to suppress labor costs, getting them operational was a costly, bureaucratic process. For municipal boosters, it was worth it to try, even if the zones did not turn a profit, for “the zone was a place that sold a place,” a sign of an economically developed city (169). Zones grew slowly. As globalizing cities increasingly saw each other as competition for attracting businesses, they seized upon a minor 1952 revision to the Foreign-Trade Zone Act that allowed for the construction of subzones, smaller satellite zones nearby existing zones. The fifth chapter examines the proliferation of these subzones in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their neocolonial twin, the export-processing zone. The subzone “was a mediator for larger transitions in the international division of labor, as the fragmentation of production across borders put pressure on particular regions and particular sectors in the United States,” elongating and fragmenting the global assembly line at workers’ expense (191).

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. Social historians will probably find Orenstein’s analytical method, which emphasizes abstraction while deemphasizing agency, off-putting. However, her technique of reading photographs—which appear frequently throughout the book—injects an exciting methodological diversity. Orenstein’s search for the traces of human labor in photographs of highly mechanized processes impels observers to remember that agency can also be a trap, a power-effect of a logistics capital regime that sees more value in a nut ripening on its own in a warehouse than in a warehouse worker that demands dignity from their boss. Social historians of all subfields would do well to pay attention to Orenstein’s methodological critique.