When a new technology makes people ill, how high does the body count have to be before protectives steps are taken? This disturbing book tells a dark story of hazardous manufacturing, poisonous materials, environmental abuses, political machinations, and economics trumping safety concerns. It explores the century-long history of "fake silk," or cellulose viscose, used to produce such products as rayon textiles and tires, cellophane, and everyday kitchen sponges. Paul Blanc uncovers the grim history of a product that crippled and even served a death sentence to many industry workers while also releasing toxic carbon disulfide into the environment. Viscose, an innovative and lucrative product first introduced in the early twentieth century, quickly became a multinational corporate enterprise. Blanc investigates industry practices from the beginning through two highly profitable world wars, the midcentury export of hazardous manufacturing to developing countries, and the current "greenwashing" of viscose as an eco-friendly product. Deeply researched and boldly presented, this book brings to light an industrial hazard whose egregious history ranks with those of asbestos, lead, and mercury.

WINNER OF THE 2015 BANCROFT PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2015 PHILIP TAFT PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR HISTORY SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 CUNDHILL PRIZE IN HISTORICAL LITERATURE Economist BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 'Knowledgeable and stunning' Orhan Pamuk 'A masterpiece of the historian's craft' The Nation For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high. Sven Beckert's superb new book is a history of the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant case history of how the world works.

'Fascinating and eye-opening' OWEN JONES DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR SHOES COME FROM? DO YOU KNOW WHERE THEY GO WHEN YOU'RE DONE WITH THEM? In 2019, 66.6 million pairs of shoes were manufactured across the world every single day. They have never been cheaper to buy, and we have never been more convinced that we need to buy them. Yet their cost to the planet has never been greater. In this urgent, passionately argued book, Tansy E. Hoskins opens our eyes to the dark origins of the shoes on our feet. Taking us deep into the heart of an industry that is exploiting workers and deceiving consumers, we begin to understand that if we don't act fast, this humble household object will take us to the point of no return.

"No other book compares...This is the book students reference during their four years at university." - Tara Konya, Southern New Hampshire University, USA Learn how fashion lines are designed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed. The book covers the full supply chain - from textiles to fashion brand production - as well as supply chain management, and competitive strategies, so that you can be successful in your future career. Topics covered include sustainable design for a circular economy, 3-D printing, fashion entrepreneurship, disruptions in fashion calendars, supply chain transparency, impact of social media, growth and evolution of online retailing, expanded omnichannel strategies, and changes in international trade, among others. Case studies, a Career Glossary, and key terms help you connect concepts to practice. New to this Edition * Content addresses knowledge and skill guidelines in the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and Textile and Apparel Program Accreditation Commission (TAPAC) accreditation standards * Expanded discussions of sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and technology across the supply chains for fashion products * Updated and expanded industry examples and case studies, emphasizing fashion brand companies from around the world * A new Careers Glossary listing job titles and descriptions found throughout the fashion industry The Business of Fashion STUDIO Study smarter with self-quizzes featuring scored results and personalized study tips Review concepts with flashcards of essential vocabulary

The apparel and textiles industry is one of the industries most affected by globalization, and involves complex relationships that are constantly evolving. This carefully researched book, formally Plunkett's Apparel & Textiles Industry Almanac, covers exciting trends in apparel and textile supply chains; manufacturing; design; women's, men's and children's fashions; shoes; accessories; retailing; trade; distribution; technologies; and smart fabrics. It includes a thorough market analysis as well as our highly respected trends analysis. It also includes thousands of contacts for business and industry leaders, industry associations, Internet sites and other resources. In addition, this book features extensive statistical tables, an industry glossary and thorough indexes. We are careful to detail the latest developments in global trade agreements, third party logistics and retail chain stores, along with important news from China and other emerging nations. The corporate profiles section of the book includes our proprietary, in-depth profiles of the 350 leading companies in all facets of the apparel and textiles industry. Major retailers, distributors, manufacturers and designers are covered thoroughly. You'll find a complete overview, industry analysis and market research report in one superb, value-priced package.

The role of quality assurance is to ensure that once a specification has been agreed, every product and every production run meets that standard. The Fundamentals of Quality Assurance in the Textile Industry describes how quality professionals in the apparel industry coordinating with overseas factories can ensure excellence. The author explains what tools are required and how to manage products from style conception to finished production and the methods used to track and evaluate samples and production at each stage of the critical path. This book reinforces the concept that quality assurance must become an integral part of the business and details crucial procedures that have been adopted internationally.

A fast-paced account of the year Clara Parkes spent transforming a 676-pound bale of fleece into saleable yarn, and the people and vanishing industry she discovered along the way  Join Clara Parkes on a cross-country adventure and meet a cast of characters that includes the shepherds, dyers, and countless workers without whom our knitting needles would be empty, our mills idle, and our feet woefully cold. Travel the country with her as she meets a flock of Saxon Merino sheep in upstate New York, tours a scouring plant in Texas, visits a steamy Maine dyehouse, helps sort freshly shorn wool on a working farm, and learns how wool fleece is measured, baled, shipped, and turned into skeins.  In pursuit of the perfect yarn, Parkes describes a brush with the dangers of opening a bale (they can explode), and her adventures from Maine to Wisconsin (“the most knitterly state�) and back again; along the way, she presents a behind-the-scenes look at the spinners, scourers, genius inventors, and crazy-complex mill machines that populate the yarn-making industry. By the end of the book, you’ll be ready to set aside the backyard chickens and add a flock of sheep instead. Simply put, no other book exists that explores American culture through the lens of wool.

By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

Dispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industry Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh. Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital's targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women's aspirations for the "good life" not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital. Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women's wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.

The apparel and textiles industry is one of the industries most affected by globalization, and involves complex relationships that are constantly evolving. This carefully-researched book, formally Plunkett's Apparel & Textiles Industry Almanac, covers exciting trends in apparel and textile supply chains; manufacturing; design; women's, men's and children's fashions; shoes; accessories; retailing; trade; distribution; technologies; and smart fabrics. It includes a thorough market analysis as well as our highly respected trends analysis. It also includes thousands of contacts for business and industry leaders, industry associations, Internet sites and other resources. In addition, this book features extensive statistical tables, an industry glossary and thorough indexes. We are careful to detail the latest developments in global trade agreements, third party logistics and retail chain stores, along with important news from China and other emerging nations. The corporate profiles section of the book includes our proprietary, in-depth profiles of the 350 leading companies in all facets of the apparel and textiles industry. Major retailers, distributors, manufacturers and designers are covered thoroughly. You'll find a complete overview, industry analysis and market research report in one superb, value-priced package.

In gold-rush Australia, social identity was in flux: gold promised access to fashionable new clothes, a grand home, and the goods to furnish it, but could not buy gentility. Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia explores how the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters who migrated to the newly formed colony of Victoria used their needle skills as a powerful claim to social standing. Focusing on one of women's most common daily tasks, the book examines how needlework's practice and products were vital in the contest for social position in the turmoil of the first two decades of the Victorian rush from 1851. Placing women firmly at the center of colonial history, it explores how the needle became a tool for stitching together identity. From decorative needlework to household making and mending, women's sewing was a vehicle for establishing, asserting, and maintaining social status. Interdisciplinary in scope, Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia draws on material culture, written primary sources, and pictorial evidence, to create a rich portrait of the objects and manners that defined genteel goldfields living. Giving voice to women's experiences and positioning them as key players in the fabric of gold-rush society, this volume offers a fresh critical perspective on gender and textile history.

Women's emancipation through productive labour was a key tenet of socialist politics in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Mass industrialisation under Tito led many young women to join traditionally 'feminised' sectors, and as a consequence the textile sector grew rapidly, fast becoming a gendered symbol of industrialisation, consumption and socialist modernity. By the 1980s Yugoslavia was one of the world's leading producers of textiles and garments. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, however, resulted in factory closures, bankruptcy and layoffs, forcing thousands of garment industry workers into precarious and often exploitative private-sector jobs. Drawing on more than 60 oral history interviews with former and current garment workers, as well as workplace periodicals and contemporary press material collected across Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia, Women and Industry in the Balkans charts the rise and fall of the Yugoslav textile sector, as well as the implications of this post-socialist transition, for the first time. In the process, the book explores broader questions about memories of socialism, lingering feelings of attachment to the socialist welfare system and the complexity of the post-socialist era. This is important reading for all scholars working on the history and politics of Yugoslavia and the Balkans, oral history, memory studies and gender studies.

While the topic of sustainability in textile manufacture has been the subject of considerable research, much of this is limited to a focus on materials and practices and their ecological impact. Padovani and Whittaker offer a unique exploration of the textile industry in Europe from the perspective of social sustainability, shifting the focus from the materiality of textile production to the industry's relationships with the communities from which the products originate. Featuring six in-depth case studies from design entrepreneurs, artisans and textile businesses around Europe, from Harris Tweed in Scotland to luxury woollen mills in Italy, Sustainability and the Social Fabric explores how new centres of textile manufacturing have emerged from the economic decline in 2008, responding creatively and producing socially inclusive approaches to textile production. Case studies each represent a different approach to social sustainability and are supported by interviews with industry leaders and comparisons to the global textile industry. Demonstrating how some companies are rebuilding the local social fabric to encourage consumer participation through education, enterprise, health and wellbeing, the book suggests innovative business models that are economically successful and also, in turn, support wider societal issues.

Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles. Case studies include the male suit in Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest (1959), the revolutionary production methods in the work of Carol Christian Poell and the innovative textile manufacture of Bonotto in Molvena (north-East Italy)

The apparel and textiles industry is one of the industries most affected by globalization, and involves complex relationships that are constantly evolving. This carefully-researched book, formally Plunkett's Apparel & Textiles Industry Almanac, covers exciting trends in apparel and textile supply chains; manufacturing; design; women's, men's and children's fashions; shoes; accessories; retailing; trade; distribution; technologies; and smart fabrics. It includes a thorough market analysis as well as our highly respected trends analysis. It also includes thousands of contacts for business and industry leaders, industry associations, Internet sites and other resources. In addition, this book features extensive statistical tables, an industry glossary and thorough indexes. We are careful to detail the latest developments in global trade agreements, third party logistics and retail chain stores, along with important news from China and other emerging nations. The corporate profiles section of the book includes our proprietary, in-depth profiles of the 350 leading companies in all facets of the apparel and textiles industry. Major retailers, distributors, manufacturers and designers are covered thoroughly. You'll find a complete overview, industry analysis and market research report in one superb, value-priced package.

This is a brief story of the long agitation for textile unions in the South. To evaluate the contributions of textile unions and to determine whether they are socially desirable, it is necessary to know the history of the union movement and the effect unions have had in educating workers. Mitchell gives a clear, succinct account of the movement in the South. Originally published in 1931. A UNC Press Enduring Edition - UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

"When it comes to the issues confronting working people and their unions today, Phil Cohen knows what he's talking about as few people do . . . through knowledge born of bare-knuckle experience." --Si Kahn The Jackson Project is a dramatic, hard-hitting account of a brutal labor dispute at a West Tennessee textile mill. A historically accurate page turner, this is one of the few books about unions written by a frontline participant. In the spring of 1989, union organizer Phil Cohen journeyed to Jackson, Tennessee, to rebuild a troubled local and the problems were daunting: an anti-union company in financial disarray, sharply declining union membership, and myriad workplace grievances. In the tumultuous months ahead, as ownership of the plant twice changed hands, shutting down and then reopening to exclude union leaders and senior employees, he would risk his life and consider desperate measures to salvage the unions cause. In this riveting memoir, Cohen taken the reader from the union hall and factory gates to the bargaining table and courtroom, and ultimately to the picket line. We get to know the millworkers with whom he formed close bonds, including a stormy romance with a young woman at the plant. His up-close account brims with vivid descriptions of the negotiating process, the grinding work at the textile mill, the lives of its employees, and the grim realities of union busting in America. The last generation of the old south and it's textile subculture are portrayed as they come to terms with a changing economy, racial dynamics, and the introduction of hard drugs to their community. When the organizer's four year old daughter accompanies him to the field, a unique and unexpected dimension is added to the tale. The Jackson Project offers readers a rare insider's view of the American labor movement in action.

Little Germany takes us back to the nineteenth century, when Bradford, West Yorkshire, was the wool capital of the world. Over the centuries, Germany and Great Britain have been close trading partners. When Bradford became renowned for its rapidly expanding textile trade, prosperous German wool merchants entered the country and many of them settled in Bradford. These men, comparatively few in number but with great determination, influenced Bradford's markets with their knowledge of commerce and philanthropic culture. They were merchants who left their mark, men who built the palatial warehouses in Little Germany. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century, cottage industries had given way to industrialisation and factories replaced traditional production. Bradford grew from a country market town into an industrial city, with smoke-blackened buildings and a polluted landscape. It was a city of great wealth against abject poverty and slums. Workers came to Bradford in their thousands, attracted by the prospect of work. German pork butchers from Hohenlohe in south Germany settled in the industrial cities of Great Britain. Their cheap and tasty 'take-away' meals were popular with factory workers, who had no time to cook due to long working hours.

Apparel manufacturing in the American South, by virtue of its size, its reliance upon female labour, and its broad geographic scope, is an important but often overlooked industry that connects the disparate concerns of women's history, southern cultural history, and labour history. In Striking Beauties, Michelle Haberland examines its essential features and the varied experiences of its workers during the industry's great expansion from the late 1930s through the demise of its southern branch at the end of the twentieth century. The popular conception of the early twentieth-century South as largely agrarian informs many histories of industry and labour in the United States. But as Haberland demonstrates, the apparel industry became a key part of the southern economy after the Great Depression and a major driver of southern industrialization. The gender and racial composition of the workforce, the growth of trade unions, technology, and capital investment were all powerful forces in apparel's migration south. Yet those same forces also revealed the tensions caused by racial and gender inequities not only in the region but in the nation at large. Striking Beauties places the struggles of working women for racial and economic justice in the larger context of southern history. The role of women as the primary consumers of the family placed them in a critical position to influence the success or failure of boycotts, union label programs and ultimately solidarity.

The textile manufacturing industry (NAICS 313) has played an important role in the history of the United States (US) and continues to be a major industrial employer, not only in the US, but also around the world. Textiles are mainly considered a component part of the supply chain, with end uses ranging from apparel to home textiles to industrial goods to medical textiles. Even though apparel is the largest end use of textiles, and its manufacture has increasingly moved offshore to low-cost labor countries, there remains a growing textile manufacturing industry in the US for capital and technological intensive products, such as non-wovens and those with military end uses. One unique aspect of textile manufacturing is that it includes sectors from agriculture, chemicals, industrial manufacturing, cutting-edge research and development in addition to the fashion aspects of apparel and home goods. It is highly dependent on economic conditions and consumer demand, and competition is primarily based on price. Another unique aspect of the textile manufacturing industry is its fragmented nature. Whereas a few major players define most industries, there are over 8,000 textile establishments in the US, and no major textile firm has more than 2% share of the market. The proposed book will include an overview of the industry and its supply chain including a brief overview of the manufacturing technologies of each sector. The book will also include an overview of the importance of the industry in US history and how the industry has changed over time including the movement to offshore manufacturing. An overview of new competitors, such as China and Mexico, will also be included. There will be a discussion of the competitive strategies that US manufacturers are using to compete with these countries. Outside market forces that impact the industry will be included as well as an overview of the regulations that impact the industry. Finally, the challenges, opportunities, and future outlook of the industry will be discussed. This section will also incorporate insight from the case study interviews to include differing perspectives.

This is the first work on British textile exports to South America during the nineteenth century. During this period, textiles ranked among the most important manufactures traded in the world market and Britain was the foremost producer. Thanks to new data, this book demonstrates that British exports to South America were transacted at very high rates during the first decades after independence. This development was due to improvements in the packing of textiles; decreasing costs of production and introduction of free trade in Britain; falling ocean freight rates, marine insurance and import duties in South America; dramatic improvements in communications; and the introduction of better port facilities. Manuel Llorca-Jana explores the marketing chain of textile exports to South America and sheds light on South Americans' consumer behaviour. This book contains the most comprehensive database on Anglo-South American trade during the nineteenth century and fills an important gap in the historiography.

Through the study of a regional industry, the book illustrates the impact of an expanding national market on a previously isolated market, offering new insights into a pioneer industry in the West and into the business methods and procedures of the time. The book discusses the growth of a myriad of small processing and manufacturing plants which drew raw materials from, and geared production and sales to that local economy, enjoying as they did, protection from eastern competitors who were saddled with high freight rates. The book demonstrates that once urbanization occurred in the region, bringing it into the national market, the local industries declined rapidly, disappearing in less than a generation. Perceptive, challenging, the book opens new possibilities for the study of manufacturing on the regional level.