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"Clothing trade Asia History 20th century."
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Threads of globalization : fashion, textiles, and gender in Asia in the long twentieth century
An interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion - specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production - into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long 20th century.
Book
Fabricating consumers
Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.
eBook
Challenging the de-industrialization thesis: gender and indigenous textile production in Java under Dutch colonial rule, c. 1830-1920
Many dependency theorists as well as economic historians have contended that nineteenth-century imperial policies and economic globalization de-industrialized the global 'periphery'. European metropoles extracted raw materials and tropical commodities from their overseas territories, and in turn indigenous consumers bought their industrial products, textiles in particular. This article investigates three of the assumptions of Ricardian trade theory that are often behind the de-industrialization narrative. In this article it is argued that, at least for colonial Java's textile industry, these assumptions should be reconsidered. Adverse trade policies imposed by the Dutch and a prolonged terms-of-trade boom in favour of primary commodities make colonial Java a unique case for exploring the merits of the de-industrialization thesis. Here it is demonstrated that Javanese households resourcefully responded to changing market circumstances, in the first place by flexible allocation of female labour. Moreover, indigenous textile producers specialized in certain niches that catered for local demand. Because of these factors, local textile production in Java appears to have been much more resilient than most of the historical literature suggests. These findings not only shed new light on the social and economic history of colonial Indonesia, but also contribute to the recent literature on alternative, labour-intensive paths of industrialization in the non-western world.
Journal Article
Falling behind and catching up: India's transition from a colonial economy
India fell behind during colonial rule. The absolute and relative decline of Indian GDP per capita with respect to Britain began before colonization and coincided with the rise of the textile trade with Europe. However, the fortunes of the traditional textile industry cannot explain the decline in the eighteenth century and stagnation in the nineteenth century as India integrated into the global economy of the British Empire. Inadequate investment in agriculture and consequent decline in yield per acre stalled economic growth. Modern industries emerged and grew relatively fast. The reversal began after independence. Policies of industrialization and a green revolution in agriculture increased productivity in agriculture and industry. However, India's growth in the closing decades of the twentieth century has been led by services. A concentration of human capital in the service sector has origins in colonial policy. Expenditure on education prioritized higher education, creating an advantage for the service sector. At the same time, the slow expansion of primary education lowered the accumulation of human capital and put India at a disadvantage in comparison with the fast-growing economies of East Asia.
Journal Article
Electric Pioneers: Nationalist Lobbying, Technology Transfer, and the Origins of the Chinese Electric Lamp Industry, 1921–1937
This article uses the case of Oppel Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd.—the most important Chinese manufacturer of light bulbs before 1937—to explore the early development of the Chinese electrical lamp industry. The article first explores the Chinese market for electrical lamps before the 1920s and shows how the market was dominated by imports and lamps locally manufactured by foreign firms. It then traces how Oppel was established in the 1920s and subsequently grew into a successful manufacturing business able to compete with foreign products. The article explores how the fact that government institutions were major purchasers of light bulbs allowed Oppel to engage in nationalist lobbying and thereby win government contracts. The article shows how the absence of Western-style intellectual property rights allowed Oppel to transfer technology cheaply, efficiently, and without needing to enter into Sino–foreign joint ventures. These discussions of nationalist lobbying and China’s intellectual property environment contribute to our understanding of China’s early industrialization, both in terms of the rapid industrial growth early twentieth century China saw and the leading role that Chinese firms played in this growth.
Journal Article
Embroidering the Past: Phulkari Textiles and Gendered Work as “Tradition” and “Heritage” in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab
While the men worked in the fields in the wine-like [winter] air, the women sat in the afternoon sun spinning and embroidering while they sang together, before starting to cook for their men. They embroidered phulkaris….” (Tandon 1968, 65). These stereotypes of feminine and masculine work in Prakash Tandon's memory book Punjabi Century illustrate dominant literary representations of economic production in Punjab, a province of the British Raj from the mid-nineteenth century until it was partitioned between independent India and Pakistan in 1947 (see fig. 1). Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabric-covering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab. Women stitched phulkaris generally on handwoven cotton cloth (khadi), and phulkaris shared linked construction techniques, a dominant embroidery stitch (the darning stitch), and several distinctive motifs (Frater 1993, 71–74; Yacopino 1977, 42–45; Askari and Crill 1997, 95–101).
Journal Article