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Hong Kong enjoyed its greatest success with the implementation of the restraint agreements described in preceding chapters, and by maximising the opportunities within them. This chapter examines how the restrictions, including quotas on production, were implemented within Hong Kong through the Department of Commerce and Industry and on the advice of the Textiles Advisory Board.

This chapter discusses the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 and its impact on Hong Kong. The chapter explains how, under the GATT framework, Hong Kong obtained access for its industrial products – mainly textiles, garments, toys – in markets around the world. It also discusses growing trade protectionism in major markets in the 1950s and 1960s – much of it directed against Hong Kong products.

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 describes some of the international trade negotiations in which the author participated, particularly in Europe and the USA. It explains how increasingly the USA sought to impose restraints on textile and other imports from Hong Kong, and how, despite this, Hong Kong negotiators were able, through tactical negotiation, to advance its interest. At the same time, Hong Kong industrialists were upgrading their products to work within the quotas imposed by importing countries.

This chapter examines Hong Kong’s participation in the Multi-Fibre Arrangement, a system under the auspices of the GATT originating in the early 1970s. Originally intended to be merely temporary, the arrangement lasted for 30 years and sought to bring existing international trade agreements relating to textiles and garments under a single umbrella and to provide limited scope for liberalisation. The chapter argues that this arrangement created the intriguing paradox, captured in the title of the book, of enabling Hong Kong to emerge as the world’s largest exporter of garments, prospering while upholding its free trade principles through the acceptance of increasing restrictions on it most important industry.

This chapter examines repeated renewals and extensions of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement – a system that was originally intended to be only temporary. The author describes his experiences as Hong Kong’s chief trade negotiator in the late 1970s, and the tactics used in international trade negotiations. Several examples and interesting anecdotes are given.

This chapter argues that changes in foreign trade during the 1950s pushed conservative southern industrialists (traditionally Democrats) into close cooperation with northern Republicans increasingly dedicated to trade protectionism. And, the chapter argues, this newfound closeness on trade actually allowed for stronger congruence with Republicans than was offered by solidarity on racial segregation. It confirmed southern and northern industrialist suspicions of the dangers in centralized bureaucratic government operating free from legislative or judicial oversight—though internationalists justified such power as key in the fight against the spread of communism. Foreign trade issues in the mid-1950s built on the centrifugal pressure of the Dixiecrat Movement and helped push southern industrialists into greater cooperation with congressional Republicans. Thus, while the breaks with the Democratic Party formed over the issue of states' rights, economic issues like trade protectionism helped exacerbate those cracks while also building bridges to the GOP.

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.

This chapter discusses the ruling of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Appellate Body on the Turkey-Textiles case concerning import restrictions on imports textile and clothing products. It suggests that this represents the Appellate Body's first foray into the controversial interpretative issues involving the provisions governing customs unions and free trade areas (FTA) in Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The ruling on the case provide meaningful guidance on whether section 8 of Article XXIV should be interpreted as mandating or allowing elimination of trade remedies in RTA.

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.

The significance of a call out for artists for the exhibit Contemporary Artists Respond to the New Orleans Baby Dolls is the opportunity it provides for artists to come outside of themselves as painters or textile designers and address their art from a different point of view. The significance of the exhibit is the opportunity to demonstrate how the community is an important part of grassroots culture and how this culture is surviving by adapting and evolving in response to contemporary conditions. The chapter offers an exploration of the unfolding of this process through the interactions of artists and those who mask as Baby Dolls.

Purchasers have total control over how they consume commodities. The British did not attempt to control the consumption habits of their Native American trade partners, nor the Native Americans theirs. Both parties consumed cross-cultural goods according to their taste, detaching objects from their natal culture.

The state made major contributions to the war effort through its textiles industries—blankets, uniforms, socks, tents, etc., and a large increase in farm products. The shipbuilding industry was essential to getting supplies to the front and tobacco factories provided smokes to the GI’s. Other key industries were lumber, minerals, and constructions. There were significant increases in retail sales and transportation.

North Carolina hosted some 3,000 Italian and 10,000 German POWs in the state. There were eighteen camps for Germans, where the men worked at farming, textiles, lumber, tobacco, and saw mills. Taking the place of American men who had gone off to war, the POWs were good workers with very few escapes and were able to make some lifelong friends with their employers.

This chapter by R. J. M. Blackett represents the new social history, with its insistence that scholars study the past from the “bottom up.” Author R. J. M. Blackett considers the story of former southern slaves who gave anti-Confederate public lectures during the Civil War and the thousands of workers in Britain's cotton district who attended meetings to consider British policy regarding the Civil War. Blackett argues that though there is no proof British policy toward the Civil War would have been different had public opinion taken a different course than it did, these black orators did help sway the mood in England's cotton districts against intervention.