It came as something of a surprise in picking up this book that the assembly line (at least as David E. Nye persuasively defines it) is now a century old. That the anniversary has not been more widely marked may reflect Nye's explanation that, like many technological revolutions, the assembly line was really the culmination of a series of refinements rather than a single innovation. The relative lack of commentary notwithstanding, there's little question that it was an epochal global event whose reverberations continue to shape the everyday life of the planet.

And yet Nye's title – America's assembly line – is central to his argument. This is a cultural history, and to Nye the assembly line is finally a cultural construct. There are specific historical reasons why it happened first in the United States, why it took other forms elsewhere, and why the US has had some trouble importing refinements, especially those of the Japanese, in recent decades.

Nye begins his account by noting a series of underlying conditions that allowed a distinctive form of mass production to take root in Detroit in the years between 1908 and 1913, even though lineaments of the assembly line were anticipated elsewhere. Far more than Europe or Asia, the United States had long been a society that placed special emphasis on speed, homogenizing space, circulating information and standardizing time (5–6). These social conditions fostered the more immediate characteristics of the assembly line: subdivision of labor, interchangeable parts, sequential ordering of machines, and movement of work to workers via slides and belts (27). Of course, none of this would have been feasible were not the United States a consumer society capable of absorbing a tremendous acceleration of productive capacity in the manufacture of automobiles, among other products, as has been widely noted. Ford's famous five-dollar daily wage – a labor strategy that Nye describes as rooted in the company's desire to counter a serious turnover problem – was premised on the notion that well-paid workers would be in a better position to buy his products. This, too, was a specifically American understanding of the assembly line.

Perhaps not surprisingly given its author (a distinguished technological historian) and its publisher, America's Assembly Line is a beautifully engineered book. Its ten chapters trace a narrative arc in which the novelty of the assembly line gets recognized, celebrated, attacked, reassessed, and mourned. One of the book's great strengths is that it situates the evolution of the American assembly line in a global context, charting the reactions and objections of other nations to its spread, as well as their attempts to come to terms with it in their own ways. As Nye notes, “Technology transfer is difficult, because it is never merely a technical change. It is always a complex social transaction” (266). One of the biggest obstacles that Ford encountered in trying to export its products no less than its methodology was the lack of such a consumer society elsewhere in the world in the first half of the twentieth century. But that wasn't the only issue. Germans, for example, often admired what Ford was able to accomplish, but had too much dedication to their deep-seated traditions of craftsmanship to entirely commit to its lowest-common-denominator approach to manufacturing. British managers did not like to get their clothes dirty, and British workers refused to give up teatime. Despite the enthusiasm with which “Fordism” (a term used almost exclusively outside the US) was embraced in the Soviet Union, the lack of raw materials and trained labor, and a meddling party apparatus, made it practically impossible to implement.

Still, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, many nations around the world were able to develop indigenous assembly lines, thanks in part to the enlightened self-interest evident in the Marshall Plan. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the Japanese in particular started to learn how to beat the Americans at their own game, partly by adopting methods that big companies had abandoned in their rise to hegemony, and partly by exploiting latent cultural strengths like teamwork. New techniques like just-in-time production made companies like Toyota and Honda far more nimble than behemoths like General Motors and Ford, which struggled with fitful success to adopt them amid the challenges in doing so in a culture where labor unions, individualism, and corporate hierarchy were deeply entrenched.

There's a poignant subtext to this story that becomes increasingly clear as Nye charts the proliferation of the assembly line throughout the rest of Asia and the Americas. A key pillar of the original assembly line had been high wages, but by the end of the twentieth century it was increasingly dependent on a race-to-the-bottom search for cheap labor. Moreover, the long-standing fear that mass production would produce mass unemployment has finally started to come true over the last few decades. Meanwhile, a growing recognition of the environmental impact of the assembly line was leading some observers to question its premises. Nye describes the efforts some companies have made to embrace a green approach to manufacturing (the book is leavened by first-hand observation and photographs), but, as he notes, “planned obsolescence is not an inherently ecological practice” (261). Nye makes clear that the assembly line isn't going anywhere anytime soon: it's too deeply embedded in the global economy. But he does think that Americans in particular should rethink their embrace of a specific strategy whose utility has become increasingly questionable in many areas of modern life.

In its concision, readability, and resonance, this is a cultural history fully worthy of its subject. America's Assembly Line is built to last.