What do you think?
Rate this book
The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh
Labour in bangladesh flows like its rivers in excess of what is required. Often, both take a huge toll. Labour that costs $1.66 an hour in china and 52 cents in india can be had for a song in bangladesh 18 cents. It is mostly women and children working in fragile, flammable buildings who bring in 70 per cent of the country?s foreign exchange. Bangladesh today does not clothe the nakedness of the world, but provides it with limitless cheap garments through primark, walmart, benetton, gap. In elegiac prose, jeremy seabrook dwells upon the disproportionate sacrifices demanded by the manufacture of such throwaway items as baseball caps. He shows us how bengal and lancashire offer mirror images of impoverishment and affluence. In the eighteenth century, the people of bengal were dispossessed of ancient skills and the workers of lancashire forced into labour settlements. In a ghostly replay of traffic in the other direction, the decline of the british textile industry coincided with bangladesh becoming one of the world?s major clothing exporters. With capital becoming more protean than ever, it wouldn?t be long before the global imperium readies to shift its sites of exploitation in its nomadic cultivation of profit.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
About the author
Jeremy Seabrook
59 books14 followersJeremy R. Seabrook was an English author and journalist who specialised in social, environmental and development issues. His book The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the Flight from Tyranny was longlisted for the Orwell Prize.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 25, 2019
The simple shirt we buy is a potent thing, carrying in it all manner of social relations. There are those of the labour process of its production where it exists because of a complex chain of relations and power dynamics that mean it is likely to have been made in Bangladesh or Dominican Republic, Turkey or Mexico or a myriad other places where labour law helps lessen the cost to the producer so feeding our fantasy of cheap clothing. There are also those relations of imperial and colonial residue and control, where the economic dominance of what we used to call the First World (now more likely to label the Global North) relies on the suppression of economic power and forces in the Global South (or Third World as we once called it). Jeremy Seabrook’s impressive Song of the Shirt elegantly and clearly unpacks both of these sets of relations in a manner that is historically well informed, theoretically sophisticated and entirely readable.
Seabrook has a superb grasp of the material as well as of his audience, drawing together the history of the East India Company, the destruction of the 18th century Bengali textile industry, contemporary working conditions, the spatial relations of Bangladeshi capitalism, global patterns of urban development and relations and a host of other factors highlight the similarities within the clothing and textile industries over the last 250 years, and the differences over that same time period. Seabrook’s engaging writing draws us into the lived experiences of textile workers, in 18th century Bengal, 19th century Lancashire or 21st century Bangladesh – not just in the work places but their cities, villages and homes. He pulls no punches about the depredations of British imperialism or the horrors of early factory capitalism, and makes brutally clear that the Bangladeshi workers whose life experiences now resemble those of Lancashire in the early 19th century are not on a path to development, because that is not how global power dynamics work – our cheap clothes and the profits of the manufacturers rely on the maintenance of those oppressive and exploitative conditions of work.
The book opens with the current circumstances in Bangladesh, linking events such as contemporary murderous factory fires to the contempt for workers’ lives in New York in 1911 or Manchester in the preceding century, highlighting the horrors of the Rana Plaza collapse while grounding these events not in the specificities of Bangladeshi industry but in the historical relations of imperial exploitation. This dialogue between the past and the present is then followed by an historical unpacking of British imperialism in Bengal, the changing status of Dhaka and the growth, from next to nothing, of Kolkata as the core of a British controlled Bengali textile industry. In the classic manner of a writer moving from the specific to the general, he concludes the discussion with an analysis of the historical relations of imperial free trade and (de)industrialisation. It is chilling to be reminded just how much the turn of the 20th ‘debates’ about free trade resemble the current global expectations and demands (under the guise of ‘negotiations’) of the major capitalist powers. He could have done with being a little more explicit in this section, drawing on his earlier analyses of imperialist domination, although admittedly that would have been hard to do and keep the light touch he manages throughout the book. Not doing so leaves one of the book’s most important point implicit.
Richly crafted and with a depth of historical, social, political and economic knowledge few can challenge, and an accessible writing style we should all aspire to, this get beyond the simplicities of moral outrage and consumerism-as-a-cause (we cannot shop our way out of imperialism) to show the depth of the power regime that underpins the world’s third biggest industry and its second most polluting (clothing), and in doing so reminds us that changing its relations of exploitation is a much more complex task than often presented.
Seabrook has a superb grasp of the material as well as of his audience, drawing together the history of the East India Company, the destruction of the 18th century Bengali textile industry, contemporary working conditions, the spatial relations of Bangladeshi capitalism, global patterns of urban development and relations and a host of other factors highlight the similarities within the clothing and textile industries over the last 250 years, and the differences over that same time period. Seabrook’s engaging writing draws us into the lived experiences of textile workers, in 18th century Bengal, 19th century Lancashire or 21st century Bangladesh – not just in the work places but their cities, villages and homes. He pulls no punches about the depredations of British imperialism or the horrors of early factory capitalism, and makes brutally clear that the Bangladeshi workers whose life experiences now resemble those of Lancashire in the early 19th century are not on a path to development, because that is not how global power dynamics work – our cheap clothes and the profits of the manufacturers rely on the maintenance of those oppressive and exploitative conditions of work.
The book opens with the current circumstances in Bangladesh, linking events such as contemporary murderous factory fires to the contempt for workers’ lives in New York in 1911 or Manchester in the preceding century, highlighting the horrors of the Rana Plaza collapse while grounding these events not in the specificities of Bangladeshi industry but in the historical relations of imperial exploitation. This dialogue between the past and the present is then followed by an historical unpacking of British imperialism in Bengal, the changing status of Dhaka and the growth, from next to nothing, of Kolkata as the core of a British controlled Bengali textile industry. In the classic manner of a writer moving from the specific to the general, he concludes the discussion with an analysis of the historical relations of imperial free trade and (de)industrialisation. It is chilling to be reminded just how much the turn of the 20th ‘debates’ about free trade resemble the current global expectations and demands (under the guise of ‘negotiations’) of the major capitalist powers. He could have done with being a little more explicit in this section, drawing on his earlier analyses of imperialist domination, although admittedly that would have been hard to do and keep the light touch he manages throughout the book. Not doing so leaves one of the book’s most important point implicit.
Richly crafted and with a depth of historical, social, political and economic knowledge few can challenge, and an accessible writing style we should all aspire to, this get beyond the simplicities of moral outrage and consumerism-as-a-cause (we cannot shop our way out of imperialism) to show the depth of the power regime that underpins the world’s third biggest industry and its second most polluting (clothing), and in doing so reminds us that changing its relations of exploitation is a much more complex task than often presented.
October 1, 2014
If Poverty literature can be an emerging genre, then add this one as a strong contender in the list that was populated by the likes of 'A Free Man' and 'Beyond the Beautiful Forevers'. Interesting read if reading about lives of the poor and destitute don't depress you!
May 18, 2020
Part one and six are amazingly done
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews