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Commonwealth preference was a system of trade co-operation giving varying degrees of preference to products from members of the British Commonwealth. As a British colony, Hong Kong was eligible for commonwealth preference through a certification system similar to that revolving on certificates of origin. However, Hong Kong’s participation in the system, and its application to a wide variety of Hong Kong products, came up increasingly against protectionist sentiment in the UK domestic market. In the end, Hong Kong, along with some other Commonwealth members, was forced into voluntary restraints on its exports, particularly for garments and textiles. This required a system within Hong Kong for administering quotas to factories.

This chapter extols both the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union for their innovations in the areas of education, social welfare, racial integration, and industrial relations. These two unions are praised for their creative efforts in facing the problems plaguing so many other unions during the 1920s—the suppression of conventional tactics which did not evolve or expand in scope along with changing business and labor practices. Likewise, other unions simply did not aim beyond their own workplaces, whereas the ILGWU broadened their conception to the actual organization of the whole industry, so that no one should be able to take advantage of sub-standard labor conditions. Furthermore, these unions were praised for maintaining their Jewish socialist ideals all throughout their campaigns for change.

This chapter shows that corruption can plague even the progressive, well-managed unions. It presents a letter of protest by Jennie Cohen, a former member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. In it, Cohen describes how preventing a breach of union regulations had made her the target of bullying and harassment from her fellow union members under the directions of the union agent who was heavily implied to have been the mastermind of the regulations breach. In addition, another person had come forward to sign an affidavit, accusing this agent and another union official of graft and extortion. Cohen, thus implicated in this scandal, is soon relieved of her job, prompting the publication of this exposé into the union's illicit activities.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and colonisable peoples. Whether depicted as noble savages attuned to the natural world or as wild peoples beyond the remit of civilization, to Britons the state of nakedness increasingly signified distance from civilization and reason. This chapter explores that linkage, firstly through eighteenth-century British representations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and then through an examination of British discourse concerning dance, where an explicit and often alarmed sexualization of the state of undress was paramount well into the twentieth century. This essay proposes, above all, that nakedness is not a simple description nor a state of being but a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to the generation of ideas regarding the British self and the foreign or colonial other in the British imperial context.

The plain folk of Alabama who supported the Confederacy used household objects to craft a new identity. To express that identity, they made military uniforms and supplied foodstuffs for soldiers. But the war’s deprivations undermined the household and made many non-elite whites lose faith in the Confederacy.

This chapter reviews the history of the U.S. retail industry and the role it played in the U.S. textile and apparel trade agenda. It also explains the links between the industry's corporate growth in the 1980s and its dependence on further liberalization of global trade. The growth of private-label clothing blurred the lines between different segments of the apparel industry. The success of discounting intensified the profit crisis facing the perhaps too rapidly expanding U.S. apparel retailing industry. The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing had made it easier for fashion producers to access new sites for the export processing of apparel. Trade liberalization and technological developments in transport and communication have allowed apparel retailers access to low-wage sourcing on a global basis. The limits of global retail expansion are ultimately a function of the demand for consumer goods produced by U.S. textile, apparel, and retail transnationals.

This chapter demonstrates that the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) renewed the threat of low-wage competition by Asian firms. It is also shown that the China is a major competitor to the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) countries and Mexico for access to the U.S. apparel market. A rapid acceleration of textile and apparel production for export in Asian countries has intensified competition in the U.S. textile, apparel, and retail complex. China's state-owned textile and apparel industries are now being closed, as the government promotes the construction of a more modern and efficient privatized textile industry in anticipation of increasing its exports. Trade liberalization has facilitated new levels of global concentration in the textile and apparel industries. Both Latin America and Asia are now poised to compete in the U.S. market, and there soon may be new competition from African export-processing zones.

A discourse on veiling and unveiling was implicated in changing notions of the body in nineteenth century India, prominent amongst which was the place of the female nude. Introduced by European artists and taught at the British-run academic art schools in India, the nude was also displayed in the houses and palaces of the elite as a symbol of good taste. This chapter argues that this idea of the nude – as the body shorn of all clothing – was premised upon Enlightenment ideas of the ‘naked truth’ that assumed the naked body as ‘natural’ and prior to representation. In the Indian context, however, as many authors have noted, it was the adorned body that was regarded as auspicious. This chapter evaluates how the female body becomes the site of an inordinate erotic investment in nineteenth-century Indian pictorial practice, premised upon exactly such a mechanism of veiling and unveiling, providing us with some historical perspective in recent debates on nudity in Indian painting.

This chapter focuses on the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, the second sector-specific agreement that remained outside the GATT and was introduced to the WTO discipline following the end of the Uruguay round of negotiations. The history of a system of national quotas which segmented markets for nearly four decades is discussed. It traces the Multifiber Arrangement which exposed exports of textiles to import quotas as well as the Transition Period between the MFA and ATC.

Chapter eleven presents a case study of a professional organist named Carl August Hartung whose everyday life is unusually well documented by an account book he kept for thirteen years, from the age of twenty-nine to the age of forty-two. Analysis of his financial transactions reveals the minutiæ of his everyday life. It documents not only the food, clothing, furniture, books, and music that he purchased but also the subtlety of his social network of students, colleagues, patrons, family members, and friends. Hartung’s account book illuminates how professional musicians of Bach’s time achieved financial stability by performing, composing, copying music, selling instruments, and teaching both musical and non-musical subjects.

This chapter focuses on Kawashima Yoshiko's celebrity status following her exploits as commander of her own army during the Japanese occupation of China in 1931. Yoshiko basked in the bright light as her popularity soared following the release in April 1933 of Muramatsu Shōfū's The Beauty in Men's Clothing, a novel based on her life. Yoshiko added to the buzz surrounding the publication by returning to Tokyo soon after. With the stories about her heroism in Rehe fresh in the public's mind and the splashy release of The Beauty in Men's Clothing, Yoshiko enjoyed the greatest celebrity of her life. Only later would she understand how much damage she did to herself during this period. In fact, her return to Japan and the publication of The Beauty in Men's Clothing marked the start of her slide to ruin.

This chapter discusses the collaborative research project ‘Design for Ageing that brought together stakeholders from academia and industry, to engage with active ageing participants in the co-design of smart functional clothing, with wearable electronics. The prime objective was to develop a functional clothing ‘layering system’ for participation in walking comprising; close-fitting body layer garments, with vital signs and activity monitoring, moisture management base layer styles, mid layer insulating garments, with warming devices, and outer layer protection, providing multi-modal user interfaces to facilitate outdoor healthy exercise, social engagement and enhanced well-being. Co-design methodology, new to clothing design, was adopted to help to explain complex terminologies and practices between both academic and industry stakeholders, including technologists in electronics, clothing/textiles, and gerontology. This collaborative research has contributed to training a new breed of cross-disciplinary academic researchers, in tried and tested co-design process with industry practitioners and end-users.

This chapter reviews the experiences of people who survived the Great Kantō Earthquake. It also presents facts and figures brought by the destruction. The earthquakes did more than just destroy homes and kill people. The tragedy devastated all aspects of the economy and society, making any quick returns to normalcy virtually impossible. Aside from the tremors and aftershocks, fire was also a grave threat. The narratives of the survivors mentioned how Tokyo was engulfed in flames; within thirty minutes of the first tremor more than 130 major fires broke out, one of which became a firestorm and killed 38,000 people who were hiding inside the Honjo Clothing Depot. The chapter also looks into newspaper reports about the earthquake. Newspapers not only relayed the tragedy to Japanese living outside the disaster zone, these also helped craft the earthquake as a dramatic, unparalleled calamity.

This chapter analyzes some controversial policies enacted during the reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake. It stresses the policy of kukaku seiri or land readjustment, an idea proposed by Mayor Nagata Hidejirō who wanted the Tokyoites to embrace the concept as a way to rationalize plots of land, if not entire neighborhoods in the city. Land readjustment, or so Nagata claimed, would enable the city to widen roads, create sidewalks, establish small parks, build new and larger bridges, and create fire-prevention zones in the capital. This policy however faced strong opposition from the city's inhabitants who refused to sacrifice roughly 10 percent of their lands without compensation. Another controversy that arose during the reign of Hidejirō was the establishment of a memorial hall at the former location of the Honjo Clothing Depot where the winning design was met by claims of plagiarism and failure to conform to people's religious values.

This chapter focuses on the writer Muramatsu Shōfū's connection to Kawashima Yoshiko. Shōfū was the author of the best-selling novel The Beauty in Men's Clothing, which was based on Yoshiko's life. He had been blamed for Yoshiko's execution in 1948 because his novel was taken as fact by the Chinese judges at her trial and used to convict her of treason. Shōfū met Yoshiko in Shanghai in early 1932. The Beauty in Men's Clothing would have an incalculable influence on Yoshiko's life, death, and posthumous reputation. Shōfū's grandson, Muramatsu Tomomi, also provided a compelling analysis of Yoshiko's relationship with her adoptive father Kawashima Naniwa.

In this chapter, the experience of agriculture and key industries including textiles and clothing, shipbuilding and aircraft manufacture are considered, as are labour and industrial relations and how the government began to plan for the post-war world. Feeding the nation was a key priority for the government in London, and agriculture in Northern Ireland not only expanded during war, it also underwent considerable mechanisation. However, the experience of the rural economy, along with the 1941 blitz on Belfast, helped to focus on issues such as rural and urban housing and the provision of social services which would have considerable political consequences in the later stages of the war and in the years afterwards.

This chapter illustrates how Local 65, at the time of its Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) affiliation, was predominantly Jewish and had organized people at all skill levels in small wholesale shops on the Lower East Side. In 1937 and 1938, the union began to target people who worked in “dead end” jobs, before branching out to other industries in Midtown, Uptown, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Their goal is to bring low-wage male and female workers—including blacks, more Jews, and immigrants—into the union. The strategy put the union at odds with others in the city, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and the Teamsters, which all laid claim to the low-wage workers Local 65 organized.