Sinclair compares Ford’s network of companies to an empire or a feudal system several times. Sometimes the purpose of this comparison is to emphasize the existence of a rigid class system in which each group serves and attempts to ingratiate itself with those who are higher in the hierarchy (at the top of which is, of course, Ford himself):

[John and Annabelle] had been raised under a system of industrial feudalism. If anybody had said that to them, they would have taken it as an affront; but the fact was that their minds were shaped to a set of ideas, as rigidly and inevitably as the steel parts which the plants were turning out by the million. It was a hierarchy of rank based upon income. Annabelle associated with wives of her own level, carefully avoided those of lower levels, and crudely and persistently sought access to those of higher levels. Below her were the serfs of industry, the hordes of wage-earners; above her were higher executives, and at the top the owners, the ineffable, godlike ones about whom everybody talked incessantly, gleaning scraps of gossip and cherishing them as jewels (144).

Other times the comparison is meant to draw attention to the totalizing nature of the Ford companies, which create an intricate internal social and political economy within the “empire”, whose highest value is money: