The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000

Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, Lex Heerma van Voss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754664284
• eBook ISBN: 9781317044284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This impressive collection offers the first systematic global and comparative history of textile workers over the course of 350 years. This period covers the major changes in wool and cotton production, and the global picture from pre-industrial times through to the twentieth century. After an introduction, the first part of the book is divided into twenty national studies on textile production over the period 1650-2000. To make them useful tools for international comparisons, each national overview is based on a consistent framework that defines the topics and issues to be treated in each chapter. The countries described have been selected to included the major historic producers of woollen and cotton fabrics, and the diversity of global experience, and include not only European nations, but also Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, Uruguay and the USA. The second part of the book consists of ten comparative papers on topics including globalization and trade, organization of production, space, identity, workplace, institutions, production relations, gender, ethnicity and the textile firm. These are based on the national overviews and additional literature, and will help apply current interdisciplinary and cultural concerns to a subject traditionally viewed largely through a social and economic history lens. Whilst offering a unique reference source for anyone interested in the history of a particular country's textile industry, the true strength of this project lies in its capacity of international comparison. By providing global comparative studies of key textile industries and workers, both geographically and thematically, this book provides a comprehensive and contemporary analysis of a major element of the world's economy. This allows historians to challenge many of the received ideas about globalization, for instance, highlighting how global competition for lower production costs is by no means a uniquely modern issue, and has b

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Textile workers around the world, 1650–2000: introduction to a collective work project

Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, Lex Heerma van Voss and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

The relevance of a global history of textile production over a long period of time is clear: textile products cater for a basic human need, they are among the most important goods fabricated and traded by mankind and have thus played a central role in human activities throughout history. It is therefore no wonder that historians have paid so much attention to the basic processes in producing textiles: spinning and weaving. Numerous regional and national studies on developments in the production of and trade in textiles have been published. Moreover textiles have also been at the centre of several crucial historical debates. Theories on proto-industrialization, the Industrial Revolution, technological and business history, the history of taste and fashion and the gendered division of labour often take the textile industry as a point of reference.¹

We have also long known that textile labour history was potentially very international. There are several ways to explore this international characteristic. One can follow the commodity chain from cotton or wool as a core raw material to yarn to cloth to clothing and other finished textile products. This means that a change in the labour conditions at any point in the chain can have ramifications along it, or in other parts of the world, as a link in the chain is replaced, as became clear during the worldwide cotton famine induced by the American Civil War.² One can also focus on the competition between producers, which had acquired a global scale by the turn of the eighteenth century, as mechanized production in Britain competed with highly productive hand-weaving in India.³ If the aim of the research is to cover a long period of time and at least a considerable part of the spatial diversity, nowadays textile history usually becomes teamwork.⁴

Such a joint project was undertaken by the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) with the aim of taking stock of the work done on textile workers and comparing their history internationally over a period of 350 years. To realize this broad comparison, the project follows the approach of an earlier comparative project on the history of dock workers.⁵ In the first stage a group of specialists was asked to write national histories on textile work in different countries covering the period 1650–2000. This method has an advantage over having one historian or a small team doing comparative work on a number of countries in that it can build on existing expertise.⁶ However, if one asks experts from different national historiographies to write on the area of their expertise, all these contributions tend to have their own questions, logic and – therefore – their own answers.⁷ To reach a certain degree of comparability, these national histories are based on a questionnaire, which in the project was dubbed the framework document. This listed a number of topics and questions to be studied in each overview. It is reproduced here as the appendix to this introduction. The national textile workers’ histories make up the first part of this book. The second part consists of comparative studies that have been written on the basis of these national histories. These comparative studies were vividly discussed at a productive conference in Amsterdam in November 2004 attended by all the authors involved in the project. This created the opportunity to suggest improvements to the national overviews and correct factual errors in the interpretation of national overviews by the authors of comparative papers. But most importantly, it brought together experts and information, which stimulated all those present to think about large-scale developments. It made us acutely aware of the huge amount of variety in time and space, but it also enabled us to grasp at least some trends evident in this variety.

Choices and boundaries 1: fibres and work processes

Organizing the project meant that we had to make a number of choices. The first one concerned the fibres to be taken into account. We have focused on the production of cotton and wool. Many natural and artificial fibres have been spun into yarn and woven into cloth over the past centuries and for those national overviews where other fibres are crucial, they have been included, but wool and cotton have been the most important fibres if we take global production over the entire period from 1650 until recent times into consideration.

There was also a related practical reason. The prominence of cotton and wool in textile production guaranteed there would be enough expertise to write national overviews, but we foresaw that our authors would not be specialists on the whole of the 1650–2000 period. They would therefore have to base their research for the other periods on the existing literature. This was another reason to focus on the most prominent fibres, and also on the simple production processes, as these are better represented in the existing literature. In some cases the production of other fabrics, especially silk, was so important that we agreed with the specialist that it was best to include it in the national overview.

Choices and boundaries 2: period and waves of globalization

As we have already mentioned, we aim to cover the period 1650–2000. This long period has been chosen to include the processes of industrialization and de-industrialization in all parts of the world. In the pre-industrial phase, market production of textiles was largely undertaken by part of the rural population on farms or by artisans in urban workshops. In some regions urban-based weavers and entrepreneurs sought cheaper means of production, by employing waged weavers and spinners in the countryside to produce for them. The specific nature of this ‘proto-industrialization’ has been debated, especially in relation to textile production.⁸ Don Quataert, in his comparative paper (Chapter 23), highlights that one of the conclusions of this project should be that ‘proto-industrial’ is too teleological an adjective, as it suggests a phase of industrialization will necessarily follow and in practice this was often not the case.

In the search for cheaper cloth production, technical improvements were made to enlarge spinning and weaving production from the 1760s onwards. Cotton and wool were among the first raw materials to be processed industrially after the introduction of new machinery. The ‘Industrial Revolution’ created immensely wealthy textile employers and condemned the actual producers to work on ever more numerous and larger machines in ever more efficient factories. The living conditions of textile workers and their efforts to organize themselves in order to improve their situation have had an immense impact on the debates in social and economic history about the consequences of industrialization.

Specific stages of textile production, whether in domestic, artisan or factory industry, were almost invariably divided between men and women. In some cases spinning was performed exclusively by women, in other cases by men. Certain kinds of products were only made by one sex; others were exclusively made by the other sex. Sometimes specific machines were only operated by one sex. Usually female workers (and children of both sexes) earned far less than men, even when performing exactly the same tasks. These and other aspects of the gendered nature of textile production seem to be persistent, and therefore can probably only be explained by a long-term historical analysis that compares these mechanisms in different parts of the world.

Textiles became a global product early on.⁹ Wool and cotton were cultivated in one place, transported to centres where yarn and cloth were produced, and these intermediate products were then moved to places all over the world, where they were sold for further refinement or usage. Both within and between countries, different technologies, including un-mechanized and mechanized production, often coexisted for remarkably long periods. Trade relations and political hegemony greatly influenced decisions about what processes could be performed most profitably in which place. Metropolitan authorities often prevented their colonies from protecting their local textile industries. With the process of de-colonization, however, the lower wage rates in the ex-colonies served to compete with the former colonial powers. Consequently, textile industries in the economic core regions of the world dramatically declined after 1950. Even if the direction of the flows remained in Western hands, this meant at least a partial reversal of roles. Nonetheless, long commodity chains in textile goods, linking all parts of the world, remained typical.

To cover the whole experience of globalization as far as possible was another reason to opt for a long time frame. There is agreement that at the turn of the twenty-first century, the world experienced a period in which globalization, which had been occurring for some time, dramatically increased in pace and impact.¹⁰ Given this rapid increase, contemporary observers of globalization all too hastily jump to the conclusion that it is both a recent and a one-way process. Among historians, there is also general agreement that this phase was preceded by a phase of de-globalization lasting from 1914 to 1945, which included the war economy of the First World War, slow post-war reconstruction and war repayments, the protectionist measures induced by the crisis of the 1930s and finally another war economy. The period 1914–1945 was therefore one of closing borders, growing trade barriers and increasing limitations on international migration, as the national overviews show.

Prior to that, the period 1820–1913 saw an earlier globalization trend that was in many ways quite as fundamental as that of the second half of the twentieth century. A transport revolution drove down transport costs from the 1820s onwards: railways, steamships, better roads and more canals made it possible to send bulk goods like raw cotton or coal over far greater distances and to places which had not been economically accessible before. Tariff barriers came down. Colonial powers forced open Third World territories and compelled their colonial populations to produce for world markets and consume the goods produced in the metropolis. Workers migrated in enormous numbers and capital was invested worldwide at a level not exceeded by the end of the twentieth century.¹¹

Economic historians, who measure globalization by price convergence, argue that globalization only started in the 1820s and that the economic consequences only began to be felt in the Third World some 50 years later.¹² But in other ways earlier waves of globalization are clearly visible.¹³ There is a particularly good reason for historians of textile labour to start their research well before the 1820s; long distance trade in woollen and cotton fabrics pre-dated this period by many centuries. However, textile labour also became truly global much earlier. When the Dutch and English East Asian Companies reached the Indian Ocean in the early 1600s, they entered a pre-existing long-distance trading system. They soon discovered that they needed Indian cotton fabrics to purchase spices and pepper in the Indonesian archipelago.¹⁴ By the 1680s Indian cotton had also become fashionable in the Netherlands and Britain, and by the turn of the eighteenth century the British had developed a re-export trade in Indian cotton and imported large quantities of white cloth to be printed and finished in England.¹⁵ This led to the demand for cotton goods in Europe, which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and global competition in the textile markets for cotton goods.

Global developments thus provide good arguments for starting a global history of textile labour in the seventeenth century, but there is more. Many of the developments that we associate with globalization, like long-distance trade in raw materials, yarn or cloth, long-distance influences in textile fashions and the displacement of production to low-wage areas are visible in the early modern period,¹⁶ and some of them long before this. It would be short-sighted to keep them out of a consideration of global developments in textile labour.

Choices and boundaries 3: spatial units

The choice of spatial unit has two aspects: the type of unit and the units selected. For the type of unit, a good case could have been made for the specific textile regions, for the ‘Lancashires’ of the world. These were usually smaller than a nation-state, but some of them crossed national borders. In such cases some aspects would have been influenced by national differences (typically those in relation to national legislation and national ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Textile workers around the world, 1650–2000: introduction to a collective work project
• Part I National Histories of Textile Workers
• Part II International Comparisons
• Index