Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. By Nikil Saval. Doubleday; 352 pages; $26.95 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

CLERKS in 19th-century America had to have thick skins. In 1860 Vanity Fair characterised them as “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly”. Unlike “real men who did real work”, they spent their sedentary days handling the paperwork generated by manual labour elsewhere.

As Nikil Saval recounts in his sharp and absorbing history of the office, America long ago overcame this aversion and became “a nation of clerks”. By the early 20th century, he writes, the office was “the place where the real work was in fact getting done”. No longer the “intimate, almost suffocatingly cosy” space of the past, where ten employees could be crammed into an area measuring 25 square feet (2.3 square metres), it expanded upwards and outward. After the second world war companies started to swap downtown for the suburbs, establishing office parks like AT&T’s celebrated Bell Labs, a precursor of the “campuses” favoured in Silicon Valley today.

Mr Saval, who is an editor at n+1, a New York magazine, uses these developments to examine the transformation of American white-collar work over the past century and a half, with brief excursions to Europe and India. Design and architecture play a central role in this story, and there is a recurring tension between creating offices that dictate how employees work and those that are shaped by their needs. Mr Saval mines business manuals and cultural representations of office life, from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to the hugely successful Dilbert comic. And he evokes the sensory world of the office to illustrate changes in the workplace: “What had started as a dank cavern,” he writes, “with towers of files crowded everywhere like dark stalagmites, had by the 1950s become clean and blindingly lit from within.”

“Cubed” is a history of Utopian striving. Many of the first clerks in the book could reach out from their desks and touch their bosses, and the distance to the top of the company seemed equally slight. An enduring belief in the possibility of upward mobility took hold among white-collar workers.

As clerical labour became ever more widespread, management theorists strove to perfect it: for Frederick Taylor, the pioneer of “scientific management”, any wasteful habits or movements could be eliminated by closely monitoring and timing employees. One of the most interesting threads in the book is the intersection between business and movements with a Utopian strain: modernism lent American office buildings a distinct aesthetic, before the counterculture of the 1960s helped shape the ideology of Silicon Valley.

Yet Mr Saval believes that these promises have been repeatedly betrayed. Office work, in his telling, has become increasingly insecure and unrewarding for the majority. The neatest illustration of this is the history of the cubicle, which haunts the book’s later pages like a tragic villain. The Action Office II, as it was originally called, appeared to be a harbinger of a liberating, flexible future. But there were soon problems. The angles between the cubicles’ three walls narrowed, turning them into boxes. They were shrinking: by 2006, half of Americans believed that their cubicle was smaller than their bathroom.

Will the story of the office come to an end, as it becomes easier to work remotely? America could soon be a nation of freelancers; together with temporary workers, they are expected to account for at least 40% of the workforce by 2020. Late in the book Mr Saval visits Indy Hall in Philadelphia, a “co-working” space that is available to freelancers for a fee. Such places offer human interaction, with its professional and social advantages, and their growing popularity suggests that people are bound to their workplaces by more than coercion. The office may be entering its twilight, but it seems workers can’t quite leave it behind.