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This chapter uses company paintings, loom tax records, data on cloth trade and descriptive records to reconstruct the very diverse world of weaving in early nineteenth century India. It provides the necessary baseline to make sense of later changes. It documents the diversity and complexity of the structures of cloth production, some highly localised and others involving elaborate commercial networks as well as the diversity of social groups involved in weaving. It establishes that a very large proportion of cloth woven and worn was coarse and durable and that alongside full-time specialist weavers a fairly large number of part-time weavers, often from marginal and ‘untouchable’ castes were involved in weaving them.

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 introductory chapter introduces the reader to the key arguments, themes, events, and protagonists in this book about power laundry workers, which spans and discusses the early twentieth-century women’s labor movement, the Great Migration, Black women’s industrial labor and organizing, the Great Depression and New Deal Order, Communist Party organizing during the Third Period and Popular Front, the rise of the industrial union movement and formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s (ACWA) industrial and social unionism, World War II and the Double V Campaign, labor feminism, civil rights unionism and the long civil rights movement, the 1960s feminist movement, and intersectionality. The chapter introduces the reader to the four key protagonists: Black workers Dollie Robinson and Charlotte Adelmond and white radical Jewish organizers Jessie Taft Smith and Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin. This chapter tells the reader that the book will provide an analysis of the working conditions and occupational structure in the power laundry industry nationwide (chapters 1 and 2) but then focus on laundry workers in New York City, one of the leading centers of the industry. Chapters 3 through 7 follow the workers’ thirty-year union campaign and argue that a multitude of factors led to unionization in 1937, including Depression-era working conditions, the support of allies in the Women’s Trade Union League, the Communist Party and the Negro Labor Committee, the emergence of the industrial union movement, New Deal labor legislation, and, most importantly, the militant industrial and interracial organizing of the workers themselves. Chapters 7 to 10 demonstrate that unionization under the ACWA-affiliated Laundry Workers Joint Board (LWJB) resulted in marginally better working conditions but that tensions quickly erupted between a predominantly Black workforce determined to pursue a civil rights agenda and a white male leadership, including ACWA president Sidney Hillman, who was intent on exercising tight control over the union and implementing a bureaucratic, business-oriented unionism reminiscent of the CIO’s former nemesis, the American Federation of Labor. Chapter 11 discusses the impact of the leadership’s ousting of Adelmond and Robinson and the suppression of their civil rights unionism for both the laundry workers and organized labor more broadly. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of sources, including union records, oral histories, census data, legal documents, Women’s Bureau reports, newspapers, and the records of the WTUL and Communist Party.

In 1937 thousands of laundry workers gathered at the Rand School of Social Science, where they voted unanimously to abandon the AFL and join the newly organized CIO. After a few months of organizing under the banner of the CIO, the workers agreed to affiliate with the powerful men’s clothing union: the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The garment union provided the resources for the workers to conduct a citywide campaign that harnessed the workers’ growing solidarities and the expertise of worker leaders such as Charlotte Adelmond and Jessie Smith. It was under the ACWA that New York’s laundry workers founded the Laundry Workers Joint Board, which by 1940 had secured contracts covering all of the branches of the industry. This chapter argues that this dramatic union victory, more than thirty years in the making, was the result of numerous factors, including the Wagner Act, the support of allies such as the WTUL, the Negro Labor Committee and the League of Women Shoppers, communist organizing, and, most significantly, the militant industrial and interracial unionism of the workers themselves. Drawing on the scholarship of resource mobilization theorists and collective identity theorists, this chapter argues that the simultaneous presence of adequate union resources and internal activist solidarities enabled the workers to overcome their long-standing occupational and social divisions and build a movement powerful enough to bring the city’s antiunion employers to the bargaining table.

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.

The chapter focuses on How to Get Away with Murder’s black, female protagonist Annalise Keating, and in different sections provides readings of beauty and professional appearance (in contrast with Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife), and bisexual orientation. The chapter employs the analytical figure of the outward spiral to capture the affective, immediate responses the show encourages. Spiral gendering permits Murder to mine intersectional characterizations for cultural resonance with viewers. Murder’s gender performances begin from starting points such as the racialized tropes of black femininity that Patricia Hill Collins describes as “controlling images” (76-106). They then proceed to mobilize viewer affect in the form of two distinct, yet similarly affect-driven patterns: first, viewers may recognize themselves in the show's portrayals, and second, they may perceive themselves to be witnesses to a television history in the making.

This chapter explores the close attention that Lawrence paid to clothing and jewellery. Lawrence had a keen eye for dress and adornment: for its utility, aesthetic qualities and assertions of identity. He saw the ‘interior decoration’ of art hung in homes, of which he wrote in his late essay ‘Pictures on the Walls’, as of a piece with the exterior decoration on/of the human body; indeed, he likened the need for changing pictures to that of refreshing one’s clothes. While at once admiring of the expressiveness and innovativeness of clothing and jewellery design, he was also critical of fashion’s perversion by consumerism and materialism: fashion for the sake of fashionability rather than beauty and renewal.

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.