The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, From Blackburn to Bangladesh

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Oh, Men, with Sisters dear! Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you're wearing out, But human creatures' lives! Stitch - stitch - stitch, In poverty, hunger and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt. -from "The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood (1843) In April 2013 Rana Plaza, an unremarkable eight-story commercial block in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,129 people and injuring over 2,000. Most of them were low paid textile workers who had been ordered to return to their cramped workshops the day after ominous cracks were discovered in the building's concrete structure. Rana Plaza's destruction revealed a stark tragedy in the making: of men (in fact mostly women and children) toiling in fragile, flammable buildings who provide the world with limitless cheap garments - through Walmart, Benetton and Gap - and bring in 70% of Bangladesh's foreign exchange. In elegiac prose, Jeremy Seabrook investigates the disproportionate sacrifices demanded by the manufacture of such throwaway items as baseball caps and sweatshirts. He also traces the intertwined histories of workers in what is now Bangladesh, and Lancashire. Two hundred years ago the former were dispossessed of ancient skills and their counterparts in Lancashire forced into labour settlements; in a ghostly replay of traffic in the other direction, the decline of Britain's textile industry coincided with Bangladesh becoming one of the world's major clothing exporters. The two examples offer mirror images of impoverishment and affluence. With capital becoming more protean than ever, it won't be long before global business, in its nomadic cultivation of profit, relocates mass textile manufacture to an even cheaper source of labour than Bangladesh, with all too predictable consequences for those involved. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Maps Preface Part I: Fire 1. Dhaka: a temporary settlement 2. Fire 3. Fear of fire 4. The fabric of water 5. Factories: a hardening tide of concrete 6. ‘Useful factory hands’ 7. Unrest 8. The factory owners and their reasons 9. Ghostly reconstitution of old imperial hierarchies 10. A modest demonstration 11. The battleground of Savar 12. The spectre of Senghenydd, 1913 Part II: Barisal 13. A melting, melancholy place 14. Amanathganj: submergence and eviction 15. Death of a freedom fighter 16. Rumours of freedom 17. Middle class in a city of starvelings 18. Sinking ship in emerald waters 19. Hungry, thieving river 20. The path of migrants 21. A factory in the suburbs 22. The new gumashtas 23. Urbanization without industry Part III: Dhaka 24. The world’s ‘least liveable’ city 25. A history interwoven with textile 26. The fall of Dacca 27. Spinning women 28. After the weavers 29. A city in decline 30. A city for psychoanalysts Part IV: Murshidabad 31. A city neglected and unpeopled 32. A haunted culture 33. A shell of departed grandeur Part V: Kolkata 34. The rise of two Calcuttas 35. Bhadralok and chotolok 36. The jute mills 37. A dying city? 38. Kolkata and Dhaka: divergent Bengals Part VI: Industrialism 39. Free trade and protectionism in Britain 40. Imperialism began at ‘home’ 41. Manchester: under a pall of smoke 42. Bengal and Lancashire: prosperity and ruin 43. The shifting dunes of humanity 44. Nabobs and new nawabs 45. Two nations 46. First- and second-hand industrialism 47. Teaspoons of legal humanitarianism 48. Bombay mills: boom and bust 49. Re-industrializing Bangladesh 50. The un-industrializing of Lancashire 51. The pleasure factories 52. Turning and turning in the widening gyre Select Bibliography