Donald Trump is a tremendous fan of making things. His recent inaugural address promised that America would soon become “a manufacturing nation once again”. His many planned tariffs, though disastrous in other ways, will encourage at least some global companies to relocate factories back to the US. You don’t need to be a fan of the US president’s policies to know that worries about American industrial decline will also remain prominent so long as he is president.

Against this backdrop, Tim Minshall’s new book Your Life Is Manufactured presents a timely argument about the perils of losing touch with the art of making things. No Maga acolyte, Minshall is an academic expert on innovation and technology, who leads a specialist manufacturing institute at Cambridge university. His book is part admiring hymn to the sophistication of modern factories and logistics systems, and part warning about the ways our modern global manufacturing system can go awry.

“This system has developed two emergent properties we are less happy with: it is mind-bogglingly complex and worryingly fragile,” he writes. By emergent he means that when manufacturing supply chains are disrupted — as happened during the Covid pandemic, for instance — their various independent parts are often affected simultaneously. Problems ripple back and forth through the system, from material suppliers and industrial facilities to logistics and consumers, increasing the risk of shortages, or even outright collapse.