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This chapter examines the role of the Singer sewing machine in fashioning a consumer market in colonial Lanka, now known as Sri Lanka. More specifically, it narrates the fashioning of a market imaginary, which indexed modernity as desire installed through the Singer machine. The chapter first provides an overview of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and the market for sewing machines before discussing the company's global expansion. It then considers the Asian market for the Singer sewing machine and the Singer Company's venture in Ceylon/Lanka. It also analyzes the diffusion of the Singer sewing machine in Lanka and the marketing strategies used by Singer in the country. Finally, it explores how the Singer sewing machine intersected with the issue of race and the civilizing mission and how the market imaginary was exposed in circuits of communication such as advertisements, discourses of Sinhalese modern nationalism, and the economy of the machines itself.

This chapter shows that women and men in Japan defined their nation through cultural battles, including one over the merits of machine-made Western dress versus the hand-stitched kimono. The Singer Corporation established itself as a pioneer in selling mass-produced, brand-name goods in Japan. The use of a sophisticated economic vocabulary was one remarkable aspect of its appeal to women in Japan. Singer marketed the sewing machine in Japan as an emblem of modernity in two senses: That of rational investment on the one hand; and of freedom, style, and the pursuit of Western-linked pleasure on the other. Japanese-ness for women had meaning beyond skilled and nimble fingers. The dress debates only sharpened the sense of separation between styles marked as “Western” and “Japanese.” The appappa spread first in the Osaka region, both by word of mouth and vigorous promotion by magazines such as The Lady's Companion.

Sewing machines provide the first of three detailed case studies. Sewing machines represent a class of small-scale, multiuse technologies, typically sold as products themselves and integrated into production systems in households, workshops, and factories. Sewing machines arrived early in Mexico, and by the 1870s, they were diffused widely across urban and rural Mexico and become nearly ubiquitous by the century’s end. The Singer Company was not alone, but it dominated the market. Sewing machines were adopted by thousands of women in their homes and by men in workshops and new clothing factories. They made possible a rapidly growing sector for ready-made clothing, marketed to middle-class Mexicans in department stores across the country. But this was a fragile diffusion. Adoption was highly sensitive to economic downturns, and use of the machines was dependent on access to spare parts and repair expertise, which was often difficult to come by. Their consumers quickly mastered the ability to use sewing machines, but learning did not extend to a ready ability to repair, modify, and replicate them.

As both object of desire and tool for reform, the sewing machine tracks the story of an expanding consumer society in an era of wartime modernity. The war is said to have interrupted both the spread of household sewing machines and of women's Western dress. The story of the household mishin and its uses takes it into the back alleys, the homes, and the wardrobes of working- and middle-class families, recovering a sense of the ordinary agency of women as both subjects and consumers. Sewing machines were aligned with a wartime rationale of commitment to the state that left little time for a consumer life of pleasurable spending. Both wartime dress reforms resulted from and reinforced the already long hours of home sewing. To the war's end, by machine or by hand, women sewed for themselves and their families.

Manjiro's sewing machine was certainly the first to find its way into an ordinary Japanese home. The sewing machine was among those objects that carried into Japan new and at times contentious ideas concerning women's roles, the idea of progress, and the roles to be played by technology, by individuals, and by nations on the march toward an improving future. The Meiji empress was not alone in embracing with caution a world of imported goods and practices. The history of the sewing machine as an item of relatively widespread purchase and use by women in thousands of homes throughout Japan begins with the advent of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The sewing machine and new modes of sewing and garment production would bring modern life directly into the home in the form of professionalized training, a new science of home economics, and the market-oriented, mechanized fabrication of clothes.

The renowned selling system developed in America that was brought to Japan in 1900 had by then taken firm shape as a product of trans-Atlantic and transnational experience. The Singer system helped produce new social roles and forms of discipline. The household machine and home-based users came to constitute the great majority of the Singer Sewing Machine Company's market in Japan. Women teachers shared with their male coworkers mobility and the privilege of entering the homes of strangers, and were more often praised or envied than feared or scorned. Singer's experience in Japan offers insight into the ways in which practices of global capitalism are not only transformative but also at times resisted, and in some measure transformed, as they take root in particular locales. It also played a role in shaping and promoting the modern profession of the salesman, new ideas of female self-reliance, and the spread of consumer credit.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how surrealism applied its aesthetic sabotage tactics into the realm of its visual art production through an extended case study of artworks in different media from the 1930s by the Spanish surrealist Óscar Domínguez, all of which represent scenes of work or work-tool dysfunctionality and interference. The first section situates an analysis of Domínguez’s representations of work tools in the context of surrealism’s final overtures to the PCF and its participation in protests against fascism in 1934 – as well as the June Strikes that shook France in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War was about to erupt. This contextual framing anchors an argument that Domínguez’s preoccupation with representing the subverted work tool during the 1930s can be seen as part of a surrealist critique of ideologies of productivism and authoritarianism through a celebration of worker and artist autonomy and self-management (autogestion) via artistic themes of autoeroticism and occasionally, autodestruction. The second section consists of an extended iconographic and contextual reading of Domínguez’s striking painting Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle (1934–35) in relationship to cultural histories of female sexuality. A lengthy formal analysis of this oil on canvas reveals the presence of a quasi-covert set of sexual references about women’s sewing-machine work, which are in turn corroborated by a substantial nineteenth-century historical discourse tied to the garment industry and domestic labour about the sewing machine as an involuntary autoerotic device for the secondary labour force of hyper-exploited female workers.

This book explores the spread of the sewing machine into and throughout Japan. The sewing machine was so caught up in the development of capitalism worldwide that two of the most important critics of the modern condition wrote passionately about its place as an emblem of a new world. This book, through study of the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in Japan of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, presents globalization as a “localizing process,” while recognizing its flattening power in many respects. It is believed that the sewing machine played a role in shaping the modern world. Some of the chapters in this book consider the question of class by examining the varied users of sewing machines, ranging from women engaged in homework for brokers or dressmaking for neighbors to those sewing “smart” outfits for their children.

This chapter examines the technology transfer from the West to colonial India, and describes how and when everyday technologies or commodities came to India. It first discusses how sewing machines were originally introduced to India and describes how they fueled the rise of the modern garment industry. Next, is the history of the advent of the bicycle. The chapter also considers the importation of typewriters into India and illustrates how widespread the sale of typewriters has become.

This chapter examines the issues of how, by whom, and to whom small machines were sold, or by what other routes they encapsulated, transgressed, or transformed racial boundaries and gender divisions. It discusses sewing machines as racial goods, examines the racial terms in which Singer saw itself conducting business in India, and describes how bicycles became a symbol of racial and sexual transgression. Finally, the chapter examines how the use of the typewriter raised significant questions about race and gender.

The second chapter describes how a failed actor named Isaac Merritt Singer created a global sewing machine empire during the Industrial Revolution with the help of his partner Edward Clark, the grandfather of Never Say Die’s owner Robert Sterling Clark. The globally recognized Singer brand had its origins in Isaac Merritt Singer’s innovative modifications of existing sewing machines, but it was Clark who managed to keep the company moving forward despite the public’s discovery of Singer’s bigamy and two-dozen acknowledged children, which had the potential to alienate Singer’s customers and offend their Victorian morals.

This chapter is a memoir of the knee-pants makers' strike of 1890, which marked a period of nearly constant unrest among Jewish workers. Nine hundred knee-pants makers had gone on a general strike with the demand that bosses and contractors provide sewing machines for their work. Until then, every knee-pants maker had to bring their own katerinke (sewing machine), needles, thread, and so on to work. Four months later, in July 1890, a second general strike broke out among the knee-pants workers—this time for higher wages. A riot ensued. The strike was lost after that, and the knee-pants workers union collapsed—only to be resurrected later with the help of the United Hebrew Trades.

We come at last to the forbidden first person, the I am. No story is right until the teller is part of it. Yet a peculiar mischief is abroad in the land of science and engineering. It is a mischief born out of the noblest of intentions. For decades it has spread like the flu, far beyond the technical journals that gave it birth. The intention is to let us stand like blindfolded Justice—pure, objective, and aloof. To do this, we write about our work without ever speaking in the first person. We try to let fact speak for itself. Instead of saying, “I solved the equation and got y = log x”, we write, “The solution of the equation is y = log x”. We turn our actions into facts that are untouched by human hands. To some extent we must do that. Our facts should be sufficiently solid that we do not need to prop them up with our desires. Third-person detachment has its place, but my own person is not so easy to erase. Suppose I think another engineer, whom I shall call Hoople, is wrong. I am not objective about Hoople, but I must appear to be. So I write, “It is believed that Hoople is incorrect.” That’s a cheap shot. I express my thoughts without taking responsibility for them. I seem to be reporting general disapproval of Hoople. In the unholy name of objectivity, I make it sound as though the whole profession thinks that Hoople is a fool. Now radio and TV journalists are doing it. I cringe every time I hear, “It is expected that Congress will pass the bill. “Who expects that? The announcer? The Democrats? A government official? Maybe the soy sauce lobby is the expectant source. So instead of objectivity we get obfuscation. If our work really occurred in objective isolation, we could write about it that way. But people are present. They think and they act. If we fail to represent human intervention accurately, we are dishonest, and objectivity becomes meaningless. The things we make tell the world what we are.

As people in northern Europe and North America industrialized their societies, they transformed the scale and the social setting of work and created opportunities for the use of new skills. They consumed forest and mineral resources, diverted rivers, and discarded wastes on a scale previously unknown. They placed rural and urban workplaces and transportation networks on the face of the land and increasingly detached patterns of daily life from their agricultural roots. With their new transportation and communication systems, Europeans, joined later by Americans, spread the influence of Western industry worldwide, first in the exploitation of distant, natural resources for use by the industrial nations and, later, by the delivery of industrial products to traditional societies. Until about A.D. 1000, Europeans used technology in much the same way as peoples in other parts of the world, but their adoption of water power for industry was a harbinger of change. In 1086, the Domesday survey of England revealed one water-powered grain mill for every fifty households. Europeans began using mechanical power in tasks that included beermaking, fulling, tanning, and ironmaking. A conjunction of conveniently available natural resources, weak national governments, and religious beliefs that assigned dignity to work and that did not hinder technological enterprise helped Europeans to nucleate industrialization. They subsequently brought their industrial heritage to North America. In the early decades of the republic, Americans began the stage of industrialization that soon came to dominate much of the landscape and most people’s lives. The rate at which Americans created an industrial society was slow compared with the rapidity with which they are now dismantling it. Already young Americans have lost most of their opportunities to see or experience the transformation of materials into finished products or to learn about the properties of wood and steel or about the handling of tools through personal experience. During the years of industrial growth, the village smithy often stood under a spreading chestnut tree, a place where . . . . . . children coming home from school Look in at the open door; They love to see the flaming forge, And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor. . .