The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 (review)

If there were a contest among recent scholarly publications for the label of “weighty tome,” The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 would trounce all competitors. At 838 pages, seven centimetres thick, and 4.2 US pounds, the book is anything but a “light read.” A product of the International Institute of Social History (iish, Amsterdam), it is an impressive work of comparative historiography. Containing country-specific studies and international comparisons, the volume offers a comprehensive historical perspective on the international production of cotton and wool textiles during the 1650–2000 period. The chapters in the book are the product of more than 30 scholars, primarily comparative and economic historians by training.

The editors of the volume and organizers of the historical project selected this period because the core industrial transformations of the cotton and wool textile industry are included in these years. These transformations include early industrialization, the maturation of the industry, and the recent processes of de-industrialization, globalization, and spatial reorganization. The nation-state is the unit of analysis in Part I, which consists of 20 chapters about specific nation-states and some empires, ranging from Argentina to the United States of America. These chapters, written by area experts, provide compact overviews of the historical development of the industry in each of the nation-states. The area studies are complemented by nine comparative global chapters that include studies of workers, unions, gender, identity, ethnicity and migration, spatial divisions of labour, global trade, proto-industrialization and working conditions.

Providing a core set of concepts, methodologies, or paradigms is a challenge for any endeavour which brings together diverse scholars dealing with different nation-states and topics. A series of conferences by iish provided the organizational infrastructure that went into the production of the book. The editors found that a set of common themes emerged from these conferences. First, the scholars involved in the production of the chapters avoided a teleological view about historical development; second, the chapters demonstrate the near-universality of the process of the entrepreneurial search for lowering production costs, which they label as “race to the bottom,” borrowing the concept from the contemporary critique of globalization. Third, that the bargaining power of textile workers across time and place has been weak.

I will leave it to area specialists to comment upon the specifics of the 20 nation-state/empire chapters. As a sociologist, what I found surprising was the lack of a core set of theoretical concepts and frameworks. Perhaps, as the editors make explicitly clear, the principle of avoiding teleology may also have meant avoiding any theoretical debates about the capitalist world system, the development of underdevelopment, uneven development, accumulation by dispossession, unequal exchange, global commodity chains, regulation theory, mixed modes of production, spatial structure of accumulation, and/or current debates about globalization. Likewise, my review of the index did not find any listing for capitalism, accumulation, rationalization, bureaucratization, or alienation – concepts core to the sociological analysis of industrialization. Fair enough, although many of the core concepts from these macro-theory debates are implicit in both the nation-specific and global-comparative chapters. I would argue that macro-theory is not necessarily teleological, but this is not the time or the place for debates on the philosophy of science.

Like many edited volumes, there is a strong probability that students and scholars will be very selective in their reading. For example, someone doing a study of the impact of restructuring on the gender division of labour in Canada might read only one or two of the chapters. In essence the breadth of the book, which is one of its greatest strengths, is also one of its weaknesses. Why there is a “race to the bottom” or why labour lacks power in the textile sector are questions that would require either several more such volumes or a macro-theory of society and how...