In The Hamlet Fire, Bryant Simon tells the tragic story of a fatal fire in a chicken processing factory in the town of Hamlet, in Richmond County, North Carolina, on 3 September 1991. The single-storey plant was owned by Imperial Food Products, a company with a poor fire safety record at its previous Pennsylvania site. The fire started in a large deep-fat-fryer vat, filled with chicken grease and cooking oil, and spread rapidly throughout the maze of rooms and movable walls. There were 25 workers, mostly women (roughly half of whom were African Americans), who died from the choking smoke because they were unable to escape through the exits, which had been padlocked from the outside (allegedly to prevent staff from stealing chickens). Another 54 workers suffered injuries including burns, respiratory disease and post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing upon oral histories, news coverage and state records, Simon gives a voice to these survivors, the victims and their families that are rarely seen in histories of disasters that tend to prioritize the voices of expert planners, first responders and officials.

This is not to say that Simon does not seek to include the views of those found responsible for the fire – either through their neglect of worker safety or their desire to profit from ‘the world of cheap’ (p. 132). Rather, he meets a deafening wall of silence – from local and state officials, federal firefighters and inspectors, and the company's owner, Emmett J. Roe, who received a 20-year prison sentence for non-negligent manslaughter (released after only four years). There are no extant business records, and Roe never spoke about the fire with any of the families or the media. Fire brigade archives provide scant pickings too since the Hamlet Fire Department did not have a map of the plant or any record of having inspected the premises. Silence is, then, a pervading theme of the book. This is a story about invisible, powerless and expendable workers – predominantly poor and under-educated African American single mothers – who lived and worked on the margins of society, in rural ghettoes isolated from the large urban markets they were supplying, and who suffered in silence because they feared the consequences of losing their jobs and homes.

The micro-history of the fire is fascinating reading for social historians of disaster. But the book's reach extends far wider than this by addressing themes of interest to historians of the body, labour and the state, as well as economic and urban historians. I defy anyone to read chapter 3, ‘Chicken’, with its jaw-dropping discussion of industrialized poultry breeding and farming methods, and not consider giving up eating processed chicken products. Chapter 5, ‘Bodies’, draws upon death records for the 25 victims, describing in detail the body types, shapes and clothing to demonstrate how the victims’ bodies were also a product of history and the lack of agency facing the poor in their lifestyle choices.

The Hamlet Fire is also, as its subtitle indicates, a story about the ideological triumph of cheapness in post-war America – that is, of cheap fast food, cheap government, cheap labour and cheap lives – and the stubborn refusal of state officials and business owners to roll back against this ideology in the fire's aftermath. This ‘world of cheap’ symbolized a strategic response to seismic shifts in society as well as the economy, as state and local governments responded to the challenges of deindustrialization and structural unemployment with a raft of measures designed to encourage economic growth by putting business interests before those of workers. As small urban communities like Hamlet, once an important railroad town, ‘started to die a slow death’ (p. 27) during the 1970s, state authorities pursued a pro-business programme of job creation supported by tax breaks, minimal red tape, low pay and the hiring of non-unionized workers. The strategy worked at first: in 1978–79, 42,000 new jobs were created in the state, and $41 billion was invested in new factories and industries; by 1990, North Carolina was the most industrialized state in the whole of the country. The state also resisted what it saw as the ‘evils of big government’ (p. 167) in the form of the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, with its supposed ‘Gestapo powers’ (p. 170) over the enforcement of safe and healthy worker conditions. During the 1980s, North Carolina had the lowest ratio of factory inspectors to workplaces in the country, and, in 11 years of operation, the Imperial Food Products plant never received a safety inspection.

It was in this context that Roe was convinced to relocate his business to Hamlet, and evade municipal and state regulations concerning business taxes, labour rights, fire safety and waste water disposal for almost a decade. ‘If business prospers, so will workers’, claimed North Carolina's governor, James B. Hunt, in the 1970s (p. 53). Not so in this case, and Bryan Simon's hard-hitting history is a timely reminder of the risks of deregulation to worker and public safety alike.