Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. By Joshua Freeman. W.W. Norton & Company; 448 pages; $27.95 and £22. WHEN it was built in 1721 beside the River Derwent, in Britain’s East Midlands, Lombe’s silk mill became something of a tourist attraction. Daniel Defoe, one of its many visitors, described its “vast bulk” as “a curiosity of a very extraordinary nature”. Emplo