Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism

Out of Stock charts the history of the warehouse as a “spatial form” in the United States from the colonial era to 1989 (20). Although not quite the book that its title promises, it is full of interesting insights that will reward patient readers: Perth Amboy, New Jersey, was a major slave mart in the eighteenth century; the New York Crystal Palace of 1852 was a bonded warehouse for foreign importers; and Chicago is by some estimates the third-largest container port on the planet, after Hong Kong and Singapore. Skeptical of the oft-voiced warehousemen’s boast that warehousing is one of the “’oldest businesses in the world,’” Orenstein contends that not until the 1850s did the warehouse emerge as a “stand-alone business,” and not until after the Civil War did it become a “destination” on the “cognitive maps of city denizens” (31). Originally depositories for goods, warehouses are today depots for...