The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The gaping divide between the poor sweatshop workers of the East and the rich consumers of the West is a relatively recent phenomenon. Kenneth Pomeranz has convincingly shown that until at least 1750, China rivaled Europe in virtually all measures of well-being and development.¹ Meticulously examining data ranging from life expectancy to technological development, to consumption of sugar and cloth, to the sophistication of markets, Pomeranz finds that China, if anything, was more favorably positioned for industrial development than even the most advanced regions of Europe until the middle of the eighteenth century. Early travelers to China agreed, finding the country superior to Europe in prosperity, politics, and art.² But though they may have been evenly matched at the starting line, Europe took a great leap forward in the late 1700s. Though scholars continue to debate the underlying causes of what Pomeranz has called “The Great Divergence” that occurred at this time, there is no debate that Europe’s leap forward began with the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in turn was ignited by cotton textile factories that clothed much of the world in cheap, serviceable cotton garments that were similar in function though not in form to today’s cotton T-shirts.

In China, most early textile production took place at the level of the family. Families were generally self-sufficient in textiles and clothing, and each phase of the process—spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing—took place at home. In contrast, particularly in England, textile production by the 1700s had become at least somewhat specialized. While cotton and wool spinning remained auxiliary home industries, weaving in Britain gradually became a cottage industry. The “putting-out” system evolved wherein families would “put out” the yarn they had spun to professionals for weaving. A British visitor to China in the 1850s marveled at the self-sufficiency of the “thrifty Chinamen” and the ability of the household to engage in all phases of production:

[A]ll hands in the farmhouse, young and old together, turn to carding, spinning and weaving this cotton; and out of homespun stuff, a heavy and durable material ... they clothe themselves, and the surplus they carry to the nearest town.... It is, perhaps, characteristic of China alone, of all countries in the world, that the loom is to be found in every well-conditioned homestead. The people of all other nations at that point stop short, sending the yarn to the professional weaver to be made into cloth. It was reserved for the thrifty Chinaman to carry the thing out to perfection. He not only cards and spins his cotton, but he weaves it himself, with the help of his wives and daughters.³

The writer, marveling at the self-sufficiency of the Chinese household, went on to extol the virtues of the system. By engaging the wives and daughters in all phases of production, the system was innately more flexible and less prone to bottlenecks than the British putting-out system. The family production system meant that at almost all times of the year all members of the household could be productive in one way or another.

But what the writer had not appreciated was the value of bottlenecks. As Eli Whitney had shown, bottlenecks create a force behind them, attracting geniuses trying to go over, under, around, or through. Sometimes, bottlenecks blow the future apart. This is what happened in the late 1770s, when a choking bottleneck in the production of cotton cloth launched the modern world.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that spinning was a home-based industry, engaged in only to the extent that agricultural tasks had been completed. During the harvest season, it became difficult for British weavers to get any yarn at all. The bottleneck was made still worse by the technological progress that had occurred in weaving: The flying shuttle, widely adopted by the 1760s, multiplied further the number of spinners required to supply a weaver with yarn. In desperation, the British government began to sponsor competitions and award prizes to those offering solutions to the spinning bottlenecks.

James Hargreaves rose to the challenge and patented his spinning jenny in 1770. The first jenny contained eight spindles, immediately multiplying by eight the yarn that could be produced by a single worker. But by 1784, the jennies held 80 spindles, and by the end of the century, more than 100. Yet Hargreaves’s was but one of many imaginative inventions to revolutionize the production of cotton cloth during the next 50 years, and they came with dizzying speed: the water frame, the mule, the steam engine. By 1832, the price of cotton yarn in Britain had fallen to one-twentieth the price it had sold for in the 1780s.⁶ The race to the bottom had begun.

The spinning jennies gave rise to the factory system and to an entirely new economic order. Factory employment meant not only that workers gave up their domestic textile activities, but also that they gave up their agricultural activities and moved from farms to the new urban areas. The necessary business infrastructure, from finance and insurance to transportation and communications, soon developed to meet the needs of the new industrialists. And ancillary industries, from textile machinery to chemicals, steam, iron, and mechanical engineering, emerged as well. The new urban population in turn stimulated the development of the retail trades for food, drink, and medicine, as well as the clothing and housewares industries. Cotton spinning was also the first manufacturing industry to utilize the publicly subscribed limited liability company as a legal structure, which in turn formed the basis for the publicly held corporation as a form of ownership.

More broadly, innovation in cotton textile production was the ignition switch for the modern economy, leading to what economic historian W.W. Rostow has called “the takeoff,” in which economic growth and continual improvement in the human condition came to be the normal and expected state of affairs. Indeed, prior to the revolution in Britain’s textile industry, world economic growth had been barely perceptible. The importance of cotton textiles to Britain’s economic development was such that Joseph Shumpeter has argued that the industrial history of Britain from 1787 until 1842 “can be resolved into the history of this single industry.”⁷

Children and rural women were recruited by early mill owners not only because of their abundance and low price, but also because owners found them temperamentally well-suited to the mind-numbing drudgery of early textile work. Manufacturers found men to be more difficult, whereas women and children were just as productive and a lot less trouble. An observer wrote that the master:

The British cotton industry from the beginning developed an export bias, and by 1800 was shipping cotton cloth to Asia, Continental Europe, and the Americas. As a result, while the development of the industry fostered the growth of ancillary industries and broader economic development at home, it also fueled the engine of export-led growth. During the first half of the nineteenth century, cotton goods comprised nearly half of Britain’s exports, and at the industry’s peak Britain supplied nearly half of the world’s consumption of cotton cloth.¹³ And while the British monopoly of the world cotton trade began to decline in the later 1800s, Britain nonetheless remained the world’s largest exporter of cotton textiles until the 1930s.

Yet the British recognized the precarious economic logic of an industry that imported cotton from the United States and India, only to sell cloth back to the poor of these countries. British dominance was assured only as long as they alone had the new textile technology. As a result, the British textile technology assumed the characteristics of smuggler’s contraband. Britain forbade not only the export of textile machinery, but also the export of plans or drawings. To tighten the seal further, Britain also forbade skilled textile operatives, who might carry ideas abroad, to leave the country.

In 1810, Lowell traveled with his wife and young sons to England. No one would have any reason to suspect him of industrial espionage. Instead, as historian Robert Dalzell writes, Lowell “must have struck the people he met as very much what he was: a well-connected, mild-mannered American merchant traveling in Europe ... for reasons of health.”¹⁵ Only a few close friends knew his true purpose: a seemingly foolhardy scheme of industrial espionage that would bring textile factories to America.¹⁶

Using his significant mathematical aptitude, Lowell memorized the critical details of Edmund Cartright’s power loom and returned home to Massachusetts. While Lowell’s act was exceptional in securing for America the crown-jewel technology of the power loom, complementary technology also leaked into the United States during this period, most often in the minds of skilled artisans from Britain who had managed to evade emigration restrictions. By 1812, virtually all of the important technology related to cotton textile production had been transferred to New England.¹⁷

So, as it had in England, the production of cotton textiles led the Industrial Revolution in America, once again igniting parallel developments in urbanization, business infrastructure, and supporting industries. Enormous textile mills, the scale of which had not been seen before or since, soon lined the banks of the rivers throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The U.S. mills produced a standardized and cheap cotton cloth, well-suited to clothing slaves in the South, farmers in the Mid-Atlantic, and settlers on the western frontier. The New England mills took the growing and profitable American mass market from England, leaving only the smaller market for fancy goods for the British. By the late 1800s, the world’s largest textile mills were in New England. The biggest of all, the Amoskeag Mills on the Merrimack River, had 650,000 spindles and 17,000 employees, and produced 500 miles of cotton cloth per day.¹⁸ By the early 1900s, the United States had surpassed Britain in cloth production, and British dominance of the international trade faded rapidly (see Figure 6.1).¹⁹

New England had emerged as the leader in the race to the bottom, and the golden era of British cotton manufacture came to a close. While the United States and Europe had absorbed nearly 70 percent of Britain’s cloth exports in 1820, by 1896 they accounted for only 8 percent of these exports. Fortunately for the British, Asia would not mechanize textile production until much later, so much of the loss in American and European markets was made up in exports to India and China. But while Britain would maintain its preeminence as an exporter into the 1900s, its singular position at the top of the industry had come to an end. The profitability of cotton textile production in England fell steadily throughout the 1800s, and by 1912, exports of British cloth had peaked. Today, Britain is not a significant exporter of cotton textiles and clothing.

Like their British predecessors, the labor force of the New England mills was drawn from the ranks of “surplus” labor with no alternatives. Most of the early New England mill workers were young, single women from the farms of rural New England and Canada who could contribute to their family’s livelihood only by leaving the rocky farms and joining the swelling ranks of “mill girls.” Working conditions were better than in Dickens’s famed “Satanic mills,” but not by much. The mill girls worked more than 70 hours per week in the steamy and suffocating heat with a bell to wake them at 4:30 A.M. and only short breaks for meals. Mills offering a 12-hour workday were lauded as humane, because such lenience “gave an opportunity for the girls to wash, mend, or read.”²⁰ Even so, it was common practice to obtain more labor by falsely setting factory clocks.²¹ Working conditions were compared unfavorably to life in jail, with a physician who had visited the mills noting that in prison work hours were shorter, lunch breaks longer, and ventilation much superior.²² The workers themselves, in a petition filed in Lowell, Massachusetts, argued that the mill working conditions, through pain, disease, and privations, were hurtling the employees toward a premature death.²³

Most New England mill girls resided in boardinghouses under the watch of hired matrons, and the limited time that they had outside of work was almost as closely supervised as their time in the mills. Church attendance was strictly enforced and moral purity a condition of continued employment. In one mill, causes for dismissal included levity, captiousness, impudence, or hysteria, and even a suspicion of immorality was sufficient for blacklisting by both fellow workers and management alike.²⁴

Like their British predecessors, the mill owners had clear conceptions of the type of worker who was most desirable. Francis Cabot Lowell believed that young women, since they were “useless” on the farms, would be especially “docile and tractable,” with the added benefit that keeping young women busy in the factory would reduce their chances of being tempted into impurity or other bad habits.²⁵ The New England mills later preferred the French Canadians, whom the owners found to be “docile, industrious, and stable,” with the added advantage of their strict Catholicism and resulting large families.²⁶

So, while the British mills had drawn upon pauper children and land-less laborers, the New England spindles were powered by rural “mill girls”—also often children—and later, immigrants. In both cases, the growth of the cotton textile industry was dependent on a multitude of poor people with few alternatives, and in both cases the “ideal” laborer was hardy, docile, and uncomplaining. Early textile work and apparel work required neither creativity nor intelligence, but physical stamina and mental fortitude in the face of repetitive drudgery.

In the race to the bottom, New England’s golden age in textile manufacture would be much briefer than Britain’s. Between 1880 and 1930, cotton textile production gradually withered in New England and took root in the southern Piedmont region.²⁷ The main draw to the South was lower wages: Wages in the North Carolina textile industry during this period were generally 30 to 50 percent lower than those paid to textile operatives in Massachusetts.²⁸ While the Southern mill workers had slightly lower labor productivity, significant cost advantages remained for the Southern producers. The Southern labor cost advantages stemmed not only from differences in wage levels, but also from poorer working conditions. In addition, regulatory and cultural restraints on child labor and hours of work were significantly weaker in the South than in the New England mills. Child labor was more prevalent in textiles than in any other industry, and reliance on child labor was four times greater in the South than in the North.²⁹ Indeed, more than 60 percent of the females working in Southern cotton mills in the early 1900s were 13 years old or younger.³⁰ Finally, the Southern mill workers were more “docile and tractable,” traits at least as important as wage levels in the comparative advantage of the industry.³¹ In a precursor to today’s call for global labor standards, the New England industrialists argued that their industry’s only hope lay in convincing lawmakers to legislate working conditions and hours in Southern factories so that the lack of worker protections in the South could not be used to its competitive advantage.³²

Like the New England mills of the early 1800s, the Southern mill workers and managers lacked the skills to compete at the higher end of the cloth market. As the more experienced New England and Mid-Atlantic mills increasingly specialized in fancier goods, the Southern mills seized the advantage in providing heavy and coarse cotton cloth to the U.S. market. But perhaps the South’s most remarkable victory was in toppling British preeminence in Asia.

Southern mills from the beginning adopted a strong export orientation and by the late 1800s were systematically eliminating their British competition in Asia. Indeed, the Chinese export market was perhaps the single most important engine of growth for the Southern textile industry before 1900. Because the Asian textile industry had only begun to mechanize, and because of the Chinese preference for the durable, coarse cloth from the Southern mills, China presented to the South an immense market with insignificant competition from the higher-cost British exporters. In the decade ending in 1897, Southern textile exports to China more than doubled.³³ In the late 1800s, China purchased more than half of U.S. cloth exports, and more than half of U.S. exports to China were cotton textiles, with the great majority of this trade attributable to the Southern producers.³⁴ Many Southern mills sold virtually all of their output to China.³⁵ The Chinese market quite literally built the textile mills of the southern Piedmont region: A traveler in China reported back that in his wanderings through the country, “there was not a hole in the East where I did not find a Piedmont brand.”³⁶

Once again, cotton textiles led the industrialization of a region. The cotton mills were the first factories in the American South, and the “mill villages” that soon turned into towns diversified the Southern economy away from agriculture and spurred the development of ancillary industries. Before long, the South had developed a capability in finer goods as well and had wrested the higher end of the domestic market from New England. For the 50 years ending in 1930, the New England mills gradually shuttered and reappeared in the South. By the mid-1930s, 75 percent of the yarn spindles in the United States were in the South.³⁷

As had been the case in England and New England, most of the early Southern mill workers were drawn from ranks of the rural poor. Indeed, many of the Southern workers were former cotton sharecroppers, hard hit by low prices, the boll weevil, and the western movement of American cotton production to the factory farms of Texas. Melvin Copeland, a professor at Harvard in the early 1900s, described the Southern workers variously as “poor whites,” “tackies,” or “crackers” and appeared to hold his nose while describing the Southern mill workers who came from the surrounding farms and mountains. The mill workers:

In the early part of the twentieth century, Southern girls entered the mills as young as age 7 and worked more than 60 hours per week. They had little to no education, poor nutrition, crowded living conditions, and a hostile and sometimes violent working environment.⁴⁰ Four generations of Piedmont women might have worked in the town’s cotton mill.⁴¹

But just as the Southerners were declaring a decisive victory against the aging mills in the North, a new competitor loomed in the race to the bottom. By the mid-1930s, Japan would have approximately 40 percent of the world’s exports of cotton goods.⁴² While Japan’s lead came a full century after Britain’s, the role of cotton textiles in the development of Japanese industry was as great in Japan as it had been in Britain. In the late 1920s, more than half of Japan’s industrial workers were employed in textiles, and textiles comprised two-thirds of the country’s exports.⁴³ While Britain’s economy had long since diversified, cotton textiles was the only developed global industry in Japan prior to World War II. And while over 90 percent of Japan’s spinning capacity was destroyed in World War II, Japan had regained its preeminent position by the 1950s.⁴⁴

Following the now-familiar historical pattern, Japanese leadership in the industry was based on low labor costs and poor working conditions, and especially the prevalence of “night work,” which doubled the productivity of the textile machinery.⁴⁵ In the early 1900s, researchers sent by the U.S. government to examine the Japanese textile industries found that wages for cotton mill workers in Japan were 20 to 47 percent lower than wages in the United States and England, even when they accounted for productivity differences.⁴⁶

The first cotton mill workers in Japan were young women escaping a life of subsistence agriculture in the countryside, driven into the mills by both rural poverty and natural disasters. Indeed, recruiting agents regularly scoured the affected regions following the floods, famines, and earthquakes that struck rural Japan with tragic regularity, because such events led to especially fruitful opportunities to recruit desperate young women.⁴⁷ The rural migrants were much preferred to suburbanites, whom the mills found to be frivolous and without endurance. According to the Japan Cotton-Spinning Alliance, the ideal worker for a Japanese cotton mill was “unsophisticated, but honest, with great powers of endurance.”⁴⁸ Or, as another manager put it, women from the rural areas were preferred because they were “naïve and diligent.”⁴⁹ An American admirer observed the young women in the Japanese mills to be “docile, nimble, and deft.”⁵⁰

Female cotton workers in prewar Japan were referred to as “birds in a cage,” given their grueling schedules—12-hour days and two days off per month—and captive lives in the company boardinghouses.⁵¹ In most cases, the operatives were bound to the mills for a three- to five-year period, in a contractual arrangement not unlike indentured servitude. In the crowded boardinghouses the young women shared not only beds, but even pajamas, and they were confined to the premises by fences topped with bamboo spears and barbed wire. Food was scant, sanitation was poor, and disease was widespread.⁵² Even as conditions improved in the postwar era, the cotton mills continued to employ a variety of techniques to control and to harness female labor.⁵³

Whereas textiles was in many respects a global industry as early as the 1800s, it was only in the 1950s that a similarly vigorous world trade began in clothing. Though Japan had leadership in both industries following World War II, by the 1960s, Japan’s share of world trade in textiles and clothing had begun to fall and new leaders in the race to the bottom began to offer yet-lower labor costs and more docility (see Figure 6.2). By the 1970s, the Asian “Tigers” (Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan) had passed Japan in the race to the bottom and had assumed leadership positions in the textile and apparel industries.⁵⁴

By the mid-1970s, Hong Kong was the world’s largest exporter of clothing, with a manufacturing base designed for the low end of the Western apparel markets. In 1976, textiles and apparel comprised approximately half of manufacturing employment in Hong Kong as well as half of exports.⁵⁵ In 1980, the industry’s peak employment year, nearly 400,000 workers were employed in Hong Kong’s textile and apparel industries.⁵⁶ Hong Kong’s cheap and largely unskilled labor force—many refugees from famine in the Chinese countryside—fueled the development of other light industries as well. Similarly, in Taiwan and Korea, young women poured from the rural areas into the sweatshops and spun, wove, knit, and stitched their countries’ way to the Asian economic miracle. In the mid-1970s, textiles and clothing comprised 35 percent of Korea’s exports and employed more than 20 percent of the workers in Taiwan’s export zones.⁵⁷ Once again, the industry’s destiny was driven largely by labor costs: Wages for textile workers in these countries were about 7 percent of the level in the United States and perhaps 15 percent of the level in Japan.⁵⁸ And once again, both admirers and detractors marveled at the docility and industriousness of the rural women with no alternatives.

Inventive Brits versus Thrifty Chinamen

Help Wanted: Docile and Desperate Preferred