Out of Stock

In Out of Stock, Dara Orenstein delivers an ambitious and engrossing account of that most generic and underappreciated site in American commerce and industry: the warehouse. She traces the progression from the nineteenth century’s bonded warehouses to today’s foreign-trade zones, enclaves where goods can be simultaneously on US soil and off US customs territory. Orenstein contends that these zones—nearly 800 of which are scattered across the country—are emblematic of why warehouses have begun to supplant factories in the age of Amazon and Walmart. Circulation is so crucial to the logistics of how and where goods are made that it is increasingly inseparable from production, to the point that warehouses are now some of the most pivotal spaces of global capitalism. Drawing from cultural geography, cultural history, and political economy, Out of Stock nimbly demonstrates the centrality of warehouses for corporations, workers, cities, and empires.
 

“"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."”

"Out of Stock is a lively, readable volume that brings a number of hidden histories to light."-- "Arris"
"Dara Orenstein's Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the
History of Capitalism is equal parts history of political economy, geog-
raphy of capitalism, and cultural history of liberalism before and after
the American Century . . . Orenstein's account helps us make sense of post-Fordist production and capitalism in our own
Second Gilded Age. Historians of capitalism, as well as cultural and economic historians of twentieth-century America will find the book to be valuable."-- "The New England Journal of History"
"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"
"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"

Dara Orenstein is assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University.

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