MY EARLIEST MEMORIES FROM CHILDHOOD are vividly sensual: the spiced aroma of nasi goring, a Javanese dish my grandmother’s family had adopted from their time in Indonesia; the velvety hand feel of the Persian tapestry my grandfather had brought back to Canada along with his war bride at the end of World War II; and the grainy black-and-white images of the fighting in South Vietnam that flickered across my grandparents’ television set. These are all still with me. An early exposure to all things international, my upbringing as a military brat, and time spent living with my worldly grandparents all planted within me the roots of a lasting curiosity for the great, wide world beyond Canada.
My grandfather’s influence was especially formative on me. As a career military man and later as a federal civil servant with Canada’s Department of Justice, my grandfather’s lifelong example was one of responsibility, service and a quiet sense of right and wrong. At 18 years of age, like so many young men and women of his generation, he had given up his own dreams (of becoming an English teacher) to enlist in the army at the outbreak of World War II. His early years of service with the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals took him across North Africa, up into the bloody battles for Sicily and the Italian mainland, and then on into Holland. There he met and fell in love with a stunning young blond while attached to units of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division that liberated her hometown of Hilversum. He would later travel to the Far East, spending time in Hong Kong, on his way to Indochina with the Canadian contingent supporting United Nations’ efforts to implement the Geneva Accords that had ended the First Indochina War in 1954. He returned from his mission deathly ill and spent nearly a year recuperating before taking on a series of staff roles at Canadian Forces bases across Canada before finally settling in Ottawa. He retired at the rank of Major and went on to dedicate another 20 years of service to Canada, working out of the West Block on Parliament Hill. When I look back on his travels and youthful adventures across war-torn Europe and the remnants of former colonial outposts, I have often wondered if wanderlust is a genetic trait as I later followed in his footsteps to many of those same places.
As a descendant of United Empire Loyalists who had abandoned the United States for Nova Scotia, Grandfather had been a staunch Conservative and Royalist himself. He was very liberal with his library, however, and as a boy I spent hours poring over books on Canadian history, espionage, foreign wars and the British Age of Empire. Everything from The History of the Canadian Army to Churchill’s biography of the Duke of Marlborough to Vincent Massey’s On Being Canadian captivated me at an early age. My father’s own military travels and the trinkets he sent home from U.N. duties in Cyprus and the Sinai Peninsula only added fuel to the fire, and I dreamed of traveling the world. I was proud of our country’s role as a liberator and international peacekeeper, but, with a drill sergeant for a father, I turned away from a career in the military. I had already lived the life without joining up or getting paid for it! My mind was more on writing and history, keen to learn of exotic cultures and languages, having grown up in an era of increasingly liberal thought and social revolution.
By the mid-1980s these early influences, together with my growing fascination for the Sandinista Revolution and ensuing Contra War in Nicaragua, were responsible for my decision to study political science and history. With a little luck and a solid performance through a transitional year program, I was admitted to the University of Toronto’s prestigious Trinity College without completing high school. There I followed in the footsteps of such notable Canadian thinkers as historian Margaret MacMillan, diplomat George Ignatieff and former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. It was during those years at school when I first began to understand that my boyish dreams had been built upon misconceptions and untruths. Behind carefully crafted textbook histories of honor and sacrifice lay a foundation of colonial oppression, slavery and mercantilist expansion that had fed the voracious engine of empire, global trade and the ensuing Industrial Revolution.
Despite this academic awareness and a theoretical affection for revolutionary causes, I cannot honestly say I did much with that knowledge at the time — other than write a few letters to the American Embassy in Canada. I was by all accounts an immature and self-centered student, happier to jet off to Mexico and the Caribbean on March Break getaways than to put any real effort into university politics or social activism. But those holidays in Latin America helped me to build language skills that would lead, in a few short years, to an incredible accident of luck — one I still find hard to believe today — that landed me in the retail industry.
Like many other university students fresh out of school, I had set off backpacking one summer with little but adventure and girls on my mind. In lieu of the typical European trek, which many of my peers headed off on, I struck out instead for Mexico, hitchhiking my way from the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum across the Yucatan peninsula to Mexico City.
Those adventures are for another, very different book, so suffice it to say that two years later I returned home to Canada looking for a way to maintain my newly honed Spanish language skills. I ended up in Toronto, working part-time for the trade development office of Valencia, Spain, helping the general manager with market research and administrative duties. The pay was next to nothing, but it was interesting work, and I could use my Spanish every day. Enrique Cosi, the Valencian native I worked for, was a generous boss and as sharp as a tack. More importantly, he encouraged me to learn as much as I could about the merchandise export trade.
I took him at his word, and within a year I was looking for something more substantial to sink my teeth into. Quite by accident, I came across an advertisement in The Globe and Mail newspaper looking for ambitious young managers with experience in international trade and an interest in working in Southeast Asia setting up buying offices for an unnamed North American retailer. The ad provided a fax number in Hong Kong (as this was well before most people had even heard of the Internet or email) and, excited at the prospect of further travels, I proceeded to whip together my first resume. It turned out to be a sparse, one-page effort, but nonetheless I faxed it off, naively expecting a phone call back in a day or two.
A week went by, then a month. By the start of the second month, I had forgotten all about the promising opportunity in far-off Asia — until early one evening a call came to my mother’s home where I had been staying since my return from Mexico. An elderly lady with a thick Southern drawl addressed me: “Mr. Lavergne?” She started inquiringly. “Our man Mr. Wong would like to interview you next week in Toronto. Do y’all know who Wal-Mart is up there in Canada?” Did I ever!
It was mid-1994, and the American retailing giant had only recently entered the Canadian marketplace after acquiring the Woolco retail chain from Woolworth Canada. But aside from retail industry veterans, few Canadians seemed to know much about the Arkansas-based discount chain. What was less clear to me at the time (and what the Southern lady was quite vague about over the phone) was what exactly Wal-Mart had to do with the ad I had responded to. I would find out soon enough.
Over the coming weeks, I met first in Toronto with Charles Wong, a Hong Kong-based businessman and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart’s secretive buying agent network, Pacific Resources Export Limited (PREL). From this brilliant merchandising executive I would gain a rapid education on exactly who PREL was and what they did as the exclusive global buying agent for the American retailer.
Next, I was flown down to Bentonville, Arkansas, to be looked over and quizzed in the back office of a local travel agency by a tall, lanky gentleman named George Billingsley. George was more than just the CEO of the PREL buying group (which had taken over Wal-Mart’s own small network of Asian procurement offices in the early 1990s). He was also a close personal friend and longtime tennis buddy of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Next, I was sent to see J.R. Campbell, then head of Wal-Mart’s International Merchandising Division at the Wal-Mart home office across town. I learned over my two-day grilling that the good old boys at PREL had little interest in sending me to Asia, where I had zero experience or history at the time. What they were keen to talk about were my impressions of Mexico, my experiences there, and my abilities in Spanish.
With the North American Free Trade Agreement having gone into effect on January 1, 1994, and with Wal-Mart looking to maximize the vendor relationships it had bought into with its 1991 entrance into the Mexican retail marketplace, PREL was keen to grow its presence in the region. But as an Asian-staffed and -managed organization with its hands full in the Far East, and little cultural or business experience in Latin America, I was asked point-blank how I would feel about going back down to Mexico to start up the company’s operations there from scratch. Not a single employee yet existed, no legal entity was in place, and no operating budget had yet been put together. I had to decide then and there, I was told, and if my answer was a positive one, I needed to be ready to start immediately. It took me all of five minutes to think about it, and, though I hadn’t a clue how to go about starting up a greenfield buying office in a foreign country (a greenfield is a new business start-up generally in a new market, often an international one), I said yes without even asking about the salary. We shook hands all around, and I was in, going overnight from a part-time desk job in Toronto making a couple of hundred dollars a week to being a salaried country manager for the exclusive buying agent of the world’s largest retailer. And, as I would learn very quickly, the most important product category PREL had targeted for export to Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores was apparel.
It was an industry I knew little about at the time, but one which I would come to understand very rapidly and very successfully. My experiences in the industry took me across Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East, on to Asia and Africa, with stints back in U.S. and Canadian head offices for good measure. The apparel industry also introduced me to my wife and to a good many generous people who shared with me their knowledge and expertise not only of fabrics, materials and machines, but of people as well. I am not sure though, having learned everything that I have over the past 20 years, if I would have embraced it in quite the same way had much of the knowledge I’ve acquired been shared with me early on.
Very few of the aspiring young designers, sourcing managers, or up-and-coming merchandisers I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years had anything more than a cursory understanding of the historical context of the textile and apparel industries. Even today, with more recent efforts at leading design and business schools to broadly examine growing trends in environmental sustainability, cultural development and social responsibility, the knowledge gaps are significant for those without a background in global studies, history or political science. The American writer and social activist Pearl S. Buck has often been quoted as saying, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” And so a deeper look into the foundations of today’s global industries, which evolved out of Western society’s early industrial past, is well worth the effort. This is especially true if we are to make sense of how we have gotten to where we are today and what it will take for us to change these industries for the better — for both our planet and our race.
That era of incredible innovation in manufacturing technologies, transportation and scientific endeavor also witnessed the beginnings of the world’s first multinational organizations: the infamous East and West India trading companies. From 1600 until the 1780s, the British, Dutch, Portuguese, Prussians, French and Swedes all created new stock-issuing enterprises the likes of which had never been seen. These companies were not simple commercial organizations aimed at wresting from each other the riches of newly opened trade routes to Asia or the burgeoning American colonies of the European powers. They were near-states unto themselves, and with them was born an era of truly global commerce. Along with their government-endorsed trading monopolies, the companies raised armies, waged wars, built up new colonies, negotiated treaties on behalf of home countries, imprisoned and executed whom they liked, and subjugated local peoples — all in pursuit of financial profit. Imperial Germany followed suit later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, with less grandiose designs, though by no means less violent ones.
By far the largest of these enterprises in terms of financial scope and raw tonnage of goods was the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the United East India Company of the Netherlands, better known in English as the Dutch East India Company. Granted its charter and a 21-year monopoly on Asian trade with Holland in 1602, the VOC became a massive organization of commerce and exploitation far surpassing European rivals in scope, violence and early profitability. This was due in large part to its stranglehold on the so-called Spice Islands of Indonesia and the Malayan Peninsula. Between 1602 and 1796, the Dutch sent nearly one million of their countrymen to the Far East on more than 4,700 ships. They brought back to Europe more than 2.5 million tons of pepper, cinnamon, silks and porcelains through the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, paying out an annual dividend to shareholders of 18 percent annually for nearly 200 years.
To grasp the enormity of the Dutch trade, we might compare it to that of its better-known competitor (at least here in North America), the British East India Company (EIC), which put to sea half as many ships as the VOC while managing to extract only one fifth of the volume of cargo. But in similarity to many modern-day counterparts, it was dissolved amid scandal and corruption in 1800; by that time, the full extent of territories under its control covered much of the Indonesian archipelago. As an outcome of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, what was to become modern-day Indonesia was officially granted as a colony — The Dutch East Indies — to the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands, which retained its colonial grip on the island nation until it finally gained U.N. recognition of its independence in 1949.
As successful as the Dutch were, even given their massive size and financial muscle, the VOC was not, it would appear in historic hindsight, either as well managed or as ambitious as the British East India Company which, in 1600, received the first of its various charters from Queen Elizabeth I. Nor, for our purposes, did Dutch colonial trade have as profound or as lasting an influence on the social, political and economic development of global textile and apparel industries as did that of Great Britain.
This was hardly the intent at the start of the British East India Company’s commercial endeavors. They had rather hoped to muscle in on the Asian spice trade (which would prove such a lucrative enterprise for the Netherlands), offering significant rates of return for bulk shipments of highly prized pepper, cardamom, ginger and turmeric. But the Dutch were already well entrenched in the region, and competition between the two companies was fierce. So much so that otherwise cordial relations between the newly crowned King James I of England and the Dutch government became strained. Under pressure from their national leaders, both companies were forced into a treaty in 1619 that aimed to build cooperation between the two ventures while sharing home markets between them.
Peaceful coexistence was short-lived; in 1623, the Dutch discovered a plot by Japanese and English merchants at the trading post of Amboyna Island in present day Maluku, Indonesia, to seize the fort and kill the Dutch governor. After torture and interrogations (which included the Dutch practice of “waterboarding”), some 20 men were executed on charges of treason. Although the facts were later found to be largely true, England was enraged when the details of the case were brought home by a few of the men whom the Dutch had pardoned. The episode provided significant propaganda material during the series of Dutch-Anglo wars that raged between 1652 and 1674.
More significantly for future generations across the developing world and for England’s wool-based textile industries of the day, the immediate result of the Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be known, was that the British East India Company turned its attentions increasingly toward India. From their earlier outpost established at Surat on India’s west coast in 1612, the company expanded, adding trading forts at Madras in 1639, Bombay in 1668 and Calcutta in 1690. From these bases they built a brisk exchange in English-manufactured goods, metal-wares and tools for local spices, silk, indigo dye, tea and most fortuitous of all, cotton.
The histories of cotton and the human race have long been intertwined, so to speak. In fact, cotton had been processed by ancient Mexican and Indus valley cultures from around 3,000 BCE. Alexander the Great was among the first Europeans to enjoy its benefits; his troops left off their hot, woolen garments in exchange for cotton ones after briefly invading India in 326 BCE. By the eighth century, the Muslim conquest of Spain had helped to expand trade into Europe where Venice, Antwer and Haarlem all became key centers for the transportation and sale of the material. An early technological innovation that helped to further speed its adoption occurred when the spinning wheel was introduced to Europe around 1300; by the time of the Renaissance, cotton fabrics had become highly sought-after goods.
When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea in 1498, a new age of trade between East and West was begun. The great cargo ships of the Iberian Peninsula would over time mean the death of overland caravans of the old Silk Road from Asia. Soon, brightly colored Indian textiles were being cheaply shipped by the ton to European markets, earning healthy profits for Portuguese merchants. Their exotic patterns, washability and low cost made the fabrics accessible to many on the Continent, and demand for Indian calicos and chintz exploded. Little did the weavers and traders of the subcontinent understand that their initial good fortune would mark the beginning of a long period of de-industrialization for Indian textile industries. Just as monumental a transformation tied to the bulk introduction of finished cotton fabrics would soon impact tens of thousands of people who depended on the woolen apparel and textile industries of Europe and the British Isles.
Since Roman times, the people of Europe had depended largely on leathers, linen and wool to clothe themselves, and sheep’s wool provided the staple yarns for most of the population’s apparel. By the Medieval era, as traveling fairs began to stimulate the growth of regional trade, wool production centers in North-Central France, fed by raw materials from England and Spain, were sending their wares out to markets in Naples and Sicily and as far afield as Constantinople. Limited supplies of silk from China were also available thanks to the Silk Road, but were a class of luxury goods far beyond the reach of the average farmer or craftsman.
Throughout the 13th century, commercial trade in wool increased dramatically — so much so that it was providing a surplus of capital that became central to the economies of various Italian states, Belgium and the Netherlands. Wool exports also earned the English Crown a sizable income, having been made a dutiable item of export under the infamous Edward Longshanks’ (King Edward I) Great Custom law of 1275.
British North Sea ports, supplied by large landowners and Catholic religious organizations like the Cistercian Order, whose emphasis on manual labor and self-sufficiency supported such trade, shipped massive quantities of material to the textile centers of Ypres and Ghent. There, the wool was processed and dyed for cloth making. In an effort to develop England’s own manufacturing, in 1331 King Edward III extended his support to Flemish master weavers escaping war on the Continent to settle in his kingdom. But by midway through the bubonic plague, which raged throughout Europe from 1340 to 1400 decimating a third of the population, only ten percent of England’s wool output was being absorbed by local production.
By the late 14th century, as the Medici and other Florentine family banking houses grew their wealth through the management and financing of the trade, Italy became the dominant player in European wool markets, which depended heavily on English raw material exports. Efforts to support local production back in Britain intensified, but taxes levied by the Crown had the effect of reducing exports, which only further fueled merchant efforts to convert raw materials to cloth. The 15th-century wealth, not only of England but increasingly of Wales and Scotland, was tied to sheep; both landowners and commercial interests benefited from these developments. From 1651 onwards, for a period of some 200 years, a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts sought to regulate the exchange of both merchandise and hard currency among Britain and her colonies and to exclude the ships and merchants of other European powers and their respective overseas territories. The result was to drive up prices for British textiles while guaranteeing captive markets.
On the social front, the 14th century had seen the rise of urban-based craft guilds aimed at protecting the shared interests of artisan communities; these can be considered early forms of the unions that would one day take such a prominent place in English politics and society. Much of the added value and profits from wool came from the successive division of processing and labor. Thus, a collection of tradecrafts developed around the sorting, scouring, dyeing, spinning and finishing of wool. Rural areas, however, were beyond the reach and rules of these guilds. Enterprising entrepreneurs who had ready capital or credit could purchase raw materials, and, together with small advances to cottage-based artisans, would “put out” work for each consecutive step of production. Written contracts stipulated the arrangements each artisan would work under, and full payment was made once goods had been returned as completed. Thus the cottage industry system allowed merchants and small entrepreneurs to clear tidy profits which, in urban settings, would have found their way into the accounts of guild cooperatives. As exploitive as this might have been to those rural workshops unable to band together with their rudimentary supply chain peers, in an era of near-unregulated commerce, their lot was infinitely better than millions of unfortunates who fell under the yoke of a far more abusive and inhumane system of labor tied directly to the global trade in materials and textiles: slavery.
For most of us today, it is incomprehensible that a completely legal trade in human lives from the early 1500s through the mid-1800s allowed for the uprooting, kidnap and sale of between 10 and 15 million men, women and children to the so-called New World. At times with the collusion of African rulers and often through direct capture by European slavers, the West African slave ports of Dakar, Freetown, Christiansborg and Gorée Island, as well as those on the East Coast at Zanzibar and Mozambique, shipped their human cargo to European colonies in America, the West Indies and South America. Estimates put the number of African slaves brought forcibly to the United States at somewhere between 450,000 and 650,000 souls, while Brazil accounted by far for the largest number of lives stolen, at over three million.
It was around the same time that the British were establishing their toehold in India in the late 1600s that their activities in Africa were turning them into the largest and most efficient slave traders to the Americas. English ship builders, banking houses and shipping lines amassed vast wealth through their involvement in the slave trade for over 200 years. It is no exaggeration to say that the economic foundations of the British Empire and those of the nascent capitalist expansion born out of mercantilist and colonial policies held by all the major European powers, and to a great extent those of the American South, were built on the backs of slavery and subjugation. Even when the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 ended official state violence against Africans in the U.K. and the Americas, vested commercial interests continued their exploitation of enslaved peoples elsewhere. The law explicitly exempted U.K. territories in India, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and China, and granted reparations to the British owners of slaves for the loss of their “property” long after they had extracted what value they could from them. The government of the day paid out the unbelievable sum of £20 million (nearly $US 25 billion in today’s currency equivalent) of government income — equal to half of its annual budget — to some 47,000 slave owners.
The work of Professor Catherine Hall and a team of researchers from University College London has investigated, traced and identified the families and business interests who benefited from this government largesse. These payments added greatly to the financial foundations of some of England’s wealthiest banks, insurance companies, railways, trading companies and families. Among the most noteworthy were P&O lines (the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company), Baring Brothers Bank, Lloyd’s of London, Cambridge/Oxford Railways, the Bank of England, dozens of West Indian merchant traders, and the ancestors of George Orwell, David Cameron, Graham Greene and Sir Peter Bazelgette, current chair of the Arts Council of England. As for the “freed” slaves themselves, many were forcibly converted under a system of apprenticeship to unpaid, bonded laborers for a period of four to six years. For the average former slave, Britain’s newfound abolitionist bent left much to be desired.
The British center of slave trade activity was the Caribbean island of Jamaica, the wealthiest of their colonies by then, which served as the labor supply base for sugar plantations scattered across the West Indies. From Jamaica and directly from Africa, slaves sent to the American colonies labored first on tobacco and rice plantations all along the eastern seaboard of the United States. By the early 1700s, Sea Island cotton (as it came to be known for its coastal origins) was being successfully grown in Georgia’s and South Carolina’s sandy soils, but it would not be until 1793 and Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin that the technical issue of sorting the valuable fibers from seed waste was overcome. This would help to fuel the spread of the crop across America’s South and Southwest, where it soon became an important and vital component of the new nation’s economy.
Short of manpower to facilitate cotton’s expansion, Southerners turned increasingly to the use of slavery as a means of production; without slaves, these agricultural pursuits simply would not have been feasible. Both slavery and land use expanded as the nature of tobacco and cotton farming quickly depleted the soil of nutrients, thus pushing an ever-growing encroachment Westward. The early age of globalized fiber and textile trades was not shaping up to be a pleasant one for much of the world’s population; people were enslaved, lands stolen from indigenous races, wars of conquest were fought, and colonization expanded as these industries grew.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, the monumental changes had been steaming ahead that would wreak havoc on traditional Indian cotton and textile industries; these were the same changes that would both revolutionize business and decimate British guilds and cottage industries alike. From its network of trading ports along the Indian coast, The East India Company had integrated its commercial activities directly into an already existing and highly developed local economy. Indigo dye, opium bound for Chinese markets, spices, sugar and artisan cloth were all commodities of interest to them, with opium and cotton fabrics becoming the most significant for a variety of social, economic and, by extension, political reasons.
Not unlike many multinational companies today, the EIC had not originally sought more than a trading relationship with the Mogul rulers of the day, content to align itself with existing power structures that could guarantee it a secure commercial operating environment. This proved a prudent policy to follow until the mid-1750s, when the English began to turn to more heavy-handed and violent means to exert both political and economic power, particularly in the wealthy Indian province of Bengal.
As mercantile competition from the French increased in the region and internal political struggles within the Mogul empire took their toll, the company was all too ready to take full advantage of events at hand. By the late 18th century, EIC dominance over the southern peninsula was firmly in place. The English then turned north toward Delhi and for the next half-century battled, negotiated, placated and connived to impose themselves on the remaining Indian states.
As mentioned earlier, the demand for Indian calico had become a particularly lucrative trade. Traditionally produced by caliyan weavers in and around Calicut in the Southwest, it was an economical, plain woven cotton fabric much less coarse than the canvases or serge de Nîmes (the origins of today’s denim) wovens of the day. Calicos’ brightly colored prints appealed greatly to English home markets. Along with chintz, calico fabrics of particularly large, floral prints that had been glaze-finished began to flood into European and British markets at volumes that soon worried established wool merchants and factory owners. Two sets of highly political economic forces were set to collide.
Wool had become by the late 15th century “the great staple trade of the kingdom,”24 and the commercial interests tied to its profitability would not step aside so easily for the new India trade. These commercial interests could wield considerable political might, and from 1690 to 1721 a series of trade policies known as the Calico Acts were passed by the British Parliament. Ostensibly aimed at protecting employment among the poor, the real beneficiaries of these protectionist actions were the entrenched interests of the kingdom’s wool trading and manufacturing industries. Both entrepreneurs and the landed aristocracy stood to lose financially from The East India Company’s import competition, and they lobbied hard to have restrictions imposed. But these were not the only arguments against the newly emerging cotton trade and open-market access to British home and colonial markets. Policy makers within government were also keen to prop up the mercantilist ideology of the state, which viewed a strong balance of trade and the maintenance of inward cash flows as paramount to the economic dominance of the British Empire.
The first of such laws, passed in 1700, specifically banned the import of dyed and printed calico fabrics. Merchants were quick to exploit the obvious loopholes in legislation and for the next 20 years continued importing unfinished Asian cloth. This served to facilitate the growth of local dyeing and finishing industries in cotton, dominated by descendants of the earlier wave of French Huguenot immigrants. Anti-calico forces were just as quick to manipulate anti-foreigner feelings among the populace in their fight against imports. In 1719, riots broke out in the calico quarter of London that fueled further Parliamentary actions in an effort to ensure peace and order while curtailing the import of cotton goods in support of local industry and mercantilist policies. The 1720 update to the earlier act explicitly outlawed not only the import of nearly all cotton fabrics and goods but also their sale and use.
Two quite surreptitious exceptions to the law were allowed for, which served the interests of the upper classes in reinforcing the existing social order of the day: muslins and blue calico. Muslin was a sheer and delicate fabrication most associated with wealth and privilege, while blue calico cottons were primarily used for working class uniforms and work-wear. There had been much upper-class consternation at the growing trend of those classes deemed beneath them copying more expensive fashions with cheap calico fabrics. Thus the law was created in an attempt to enforce a code of class dress and to keep working people in their “proper place.” The impending revolutions in commerce, investment, scientific innovation and the means of mass production just around the historical bend would only serve to lower the station of under classes in both Europe and the Americas to new depths of despair.
In the introduction to this book, Carry Somers wrote authoritatively of Sir Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill at Cromford in the East Midlands of England. The Derbyshire town is today a quaint village of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, 100 kilometers southeast of the industrial city of Manchester. Here, and in a handful of similar factory towns, is where the Industrial Revolution was truly born. Aside from the social challenges that the growing working classes brought to manufacturing towns, the importance of the Cromford facilities was not only that they housed the first water-powered cotton mill. Sir Richard also brought together a series of technological advances that led in great part to the textile sector’s role as a critical engine of Industrial Revolution growth.
In the space of a little more than 40 years, from 1733 through 1775, innovations such as the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, Arkwright’s own water-powered spinning frame and cotton carding machines, and James Watt’s steam engine would set the textile world on fire as the age of mechanized production was launched. With it, the role of cotton manufactures escalated; raw material imports ballooned from less than two million pounds of the stuff in 1720 to more than 30 million pounds by the 1790s. Competitors launched their own mills as the demand for spun cotton surged (still allowed under the Calico Acts for the manufacture of re-exported goods to English colonies across the globe). New investments in innovations and the continued growth of the trade in England led to the repeal of the Calico Acts by 1774. Arkwright licensed his technologies to new operations in Lancashire, Scotland and Germany, while the apprentice Samuel Slater made good his escape to America with plans to copy Arkwright’s designs, setting up the first of his 13 U.S. mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793. By this time the export of cotton goods accounted for some 16 percent of the U.K.’s exports and would grow to an astonishing 40 percent by 1806.
The Atlantic trade that England had nurtured through restrictive practices aimed at its American colonies still continued after the colonies had gained their independence — but in reverse. By the early 1800s the United States was supplying the majority of the world’s demand for cotton. This cash crop industry built on the backs of African slaves exceeded the value of all other U.S. exports — combined — at the time. Ever-growing demand for cotton lint would see the numbers of enslaved women, men and children in key plantation states like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana burgeon to 50 percent of the population. With the impending American Civil War and Southern attempts at leveraging “cotton diplomacy” to secure European support for the Confederate cause, England turned its efforts toward colonies in West Africa and the Caribbean. When these failed (largely due to inhospitable soil and weather conditions combined with a lack of manageable local labor supplies), empire mercantilists fell back on their original source of cheap cotton: India.
The British East India Company’s subjugation of that industrious country continued, and the subcontinent was reduced under English rule to the role of raw materials supplier and captured market for home country exports. Finished cloth production was outlawed in an effort to artificially eliminate competition; EIC authorities resorted to draconian measures including the amputation of weaver’s thumbs if they dared to disobey British directives. Operating largely as an empire of extraction, Great Britain’s policies purposefully converted and then maintained its Indian colonies into a state of de-industrialized under-development and forced an economic wedge between global North and South.
Once India’s resources were tied to England’s demand for raw cotton, the U.K.’s industrialization would pick up steam, and, along with it, growing pressures on the lowest levels of society and working classes at mills like Cromford.
Along the same route from Manchester to Cromford, the equally famous Quarry Bank Mill was constructed by the Greg family some 13 years after Arkwright’s endeavors had begun. Quarry Bank, however, often suffered from seasonal water shortages as well as facing a greater degree of competition from neighboring facilities in and around Manchester proper, just 12 miles to the north. As technology advanced to free them from dependence on water, they adapted. The Greg’s conversion to steam power allowed them to run their facilities for 24 hours a day, seven days per week. This had, of course, the same devastating effect on their employees as it would in other mills introducing the same technology; many soon found themselves out of work. Those who were left, overwhelmingly women and children, faced the same drudgery of 12-hour days as did Arkwright’s laborers.
More often than not, technological advancements served to push ever-greater numbers of rural workers into teeming urban centers like Manchester. Rapid population shifts into the cities driven by industrial efficiencies quickly outstripped municipal infrastructure. By the early 1820s, the population of Manchester had soared to 140,000 from about 90,000 people just 20 years earlier. Pay in the cities was miserable, and food costs were soaring due to the effects of British import tariffs on foreign grain. Living conditions for the working classes were squalid, dirty and unhealthy. It wouldn’t be long before people began to organize themselves and call on authorities to make improvements.
On August 16, 1819 a crowd of some 60,000 men and women dressed in their Sunday best gathered for a non-violent demonstration at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, calling on the government for labor and political reforms centered on Parliamentary representation. Rather than listen, local authorities called on military units in the vicinity to arrest event organizers and break up the crowds. Inexperienced cavalry units attempted to execute the arrest warrants and, becoming stuck fast in the multitude of people around them, they panicked. Swords drawn, they began hacking their way toward their objective, and, seizing upon the men in question, were met with a pelting of rocks. At this point, additional mounted and foot units pressed in on the field with sabers and bayonets drawn before charging the crowd. By the time a senior officer could regain control of the troops, a dozen civilians had been killed and more than 400 injured. Men, women and children were all counted among the dead.
The field cleared quickly, but it wouldn’t be until the following morning that order was fully restored. Rioting continued throughout the day with further episodes of troops firing on civilians. Reports ensued of children whose fathers had attended the St. Peter’s Field rally losing their factory jobs, and other protestors who had been gravely wounded by the military were refused medical treatment. British historians would later refer to the Peterloo Massacre as one of the most significant political moments of the age. But Parliamentary reformers and labor activists against the factory systems of the day were far from finished with their work.
The St. Peter’s rally, the first large-scale political event of its kind in modern England, proved a catalyst for reforms, but they would take more than a decade to bear fruit. By 1832, the Great Reform Act of Parliament became the first step toward achieving universal suffrage in Great Britain. It extended the right to vote to middle-class merchants and property owners, but fell far short of the general population’s expectations. Rather than relieve the pressure on government, the Act caused growing divisiveness between the commercial class and the working poor — who felt more isolated than ever.
Still, some significant advances were achieved with the help of trade union activists when the Factory Act of 1833 attempted to relieve some of the harshest conditions faced by child laborers. Under this law, children below the age of nine were no longer allowed to be employed in manufacturing, while those between nine and 13 years of age were limited to a 48-hour work week. They were also to be provided with at least two hours per day of education, could no longer be made to work at night, and were to be given no fewer than eight half-days off per year, in addition to Good Friday and Christmas. Work day limits were further extended to women in an addition to the Act in 1844, and in 1847 a maximum ten-hour work day was legislated for all factory workers in yet another amendment to the Act. Workplace health and safety standards were also addressed, covering issues related to sanitation, proper ventilation and machinery safeguards. Initially aimed at laborers in the textile industries, by 1910 numerous other trades were brought under the Factory Acts, extending protections to workers in nearly every other manufacturing industry in Great Britain. Unfortunately, such practices did not immediately extend to British colonies. With the passing in 1899 of the Masters and Servants Act, child labor practices were encouraged in overseas territories, particularly in Africa; in Canada, the Breaches of Contract Act allowed for the imprisonment of uncooperative working children.
Factory owners like the Greg family were outraged and railed against what they termed governmental interference in commerce and private industry. This was a time, remember, when business operated with nearly unlimited freedom. Industry had brought the empire new roads, railways, commerce, canals and technologies, driving wealth and advancements. Factory owners declared that it would all be imperiled by political meddling. They could see no logical need for an end to the unregulated use of their employees as they best saw fit. In the face of increased labor costs and lower productivity, they pursued what did seem logical; they turned to ever-greater automation and the efficiency of machinery.
In the United States, age minimums, wages and hours of work for children were not federally regulated until 1938 with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In pushing this law forward, President Franklin D. Roosevelt lectured the American people through one of his famous “fireside chat” addresses to “not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day … tell you … that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”39 Yet that was exactly the type of argument businessmen had been making since the earliest arrival of the Industrial Revolution to American shores.
The rapid industrial growth and population shifts from rural to urban employment that had affected Great Britain were echoed in the newly expanding American economy of the day, further fueled by the millions of immigrants escaping European poverty for the “New World.” Significant numbers of children were put to work on American farms, in coal mines, and in textile and glass factories for 12 or more hours a day. And, as had been the case in Europe, it would be trade union activists, beginning this time in Massachusetts, who first called for limits to the use of child labor.
By 1836, the state enacted the first local statute requiring workers under 15 to attend school at least three months of the year. Six years later, work day limits at textile factories of 10 hours per day were also legislated in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Other states followed suit, though practical enforcement was irregular at best. According to the census of 1870 (the first to officially include working children), there were some 750,000 children under the age of 15 working for a living (and this did not account for those laboring on family farms or in family businesses). By 1911, the number had climbed to two million. Although numerous union and religious organizations took up the plight of working children, progress was slow and uneven. State representatives in Congress and the business interests tied to them could be counted on to fight whatever legislative attempts the forces of social justice pursued. For millions of working children in America, the 1938 Fair Labor law came far too late to be of much good.
The point of looking back at the historical rise of early multinational trade practices, the emergence of global business and the roles specifically played by the raw material, textile and apparel trades in that ascendancy is not simply to leave us amazed at the extent to which entire swaths of the economic structure of modern society have been constructed on oppression, violence and the enslavement of our fellow human beings. Nor is it to argue on the side of those who would relegate the historical context of such practices to another era of ignorance or see them as the sad but necessary byproducts of human cultural development that we have happily left behind. Rather, this examination has a two-fold objective, which may already prove obvious to many readers.
Firstly, it is to underscore that, at its root, capitalism as a belief system and set of practices has intrinsically, since its earliest forms under mercantilist and expansionist colonialism, been constructed on a foundation of one, inalienable practice of its faith: exploitation. What “exploitation” means may certainly prove subtle; it may simply refer to the conversion of one material into another. But as has more often been the case, capitalist exploitation is ruthless in its single-minded determination to achieve a profit and create monetary growth at the expense of all else. Ecosystems have been laid to waste, cultures ravaged, generations of humanity sacrificed to the greater good of “economic progress.” Little has changed since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution; when change does come, it is rarely brought about without external pressure being exerted on those benefitting most directly from such exploitation.
But much more interestingly for the arguments put forward in this book, by scratching just below the surface of the commercial and economic pursuits of our recent ancestors, we can clearly identify persistent patterns of behavior that foreshadow those of the leading economic and political interests of today:
the use of multinational trade policy to manipulate underdeveloped markets and raw materials pricing to the benefit of more developed ones;
alignment with existing power structures in foreign countries to guarantee order and security while safeguarding the investments and operations of multinationals overseas
both Neoliberal and Conservative calls for reducing the role of government interference in private industry;
holding companies to stricter local standards of ethical practice at home while requiring no such responsibility outside of national borders
and the reallocation of labor-intensive industries to low-cost and often dependent territories that lack the motivations or capabilities to enforce their own environmental, community, safety and labor safeguards all the while, as Europeans once did from the Jacobean Era through the Victorian age, espousing a determination to educate, enlighten and improve the lot of the poor in faraway lands.
These issues are more relevant today than ever before; they exist in today’s headlines just as easily as they might have in those of the past. The history of global textile and apparel industries, as well as the practices of most modern retail and fashion sectors that depend on them, are mired in vicious cycles built on a foundation of exploitation for profit. To break free from the systems of production, distribution, employment and trade policies that have grown out of this shared history will take not only visionary leadership. It will take a re-engineering of our social values and economic constructs nothing short of revolutionary. It is to our great fortune that a handful of outliers has already begun to both identify and implement the social and structural “ecosystems” needed to facilitate just such a revolution in both thinking and action.