Song of the shirt

Taking as his example the textile industry, Jeremy Seabrook illustrates 'the epic circularity of the dance of capital - from Bengal to Lancashire and back again to Bangladesh.'

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WHEN the East India Company first discovered the exquisite fabrics of Bengal, originally made for the Mughal court, so great was the demand for them that protectionist laws were passed in Britain - later an ardent proponent of free trade - prohibiting the use of such materials. An Act early in the 18th century forbade the use of 'any garment or apparel whatsoever, of any painted, printed or dyed calicoes, in or about any bed, chair, cushion, window curtain or any other sort of household stuff or furniture.' In 1719, a mob of Spitalfields weavers paraded through the streets, attacking all females wearing Indian calicoes or linens and sousing them with ink, aqua fortis and what were euphemistically called 'other fluids.'

Despite this, the demand for Indian textiles, especially muslin - sheer as 'morning dew' or 'flowing water' - was so great that the import of such goods could not be stanched; and they reached a peak in 1798. The weavers of Bengal were coerced by officials of the Company into producing so cheaply that they barely recovered the costs of the materials and labour. Commercial Residents of the Company made continuous advances to the weavers, which were delivered in such a way that the full order was never completed, and weavers remained in a state of permanent indebtedness. Guards were even posted at the doors of weavers' houses to ensure compliance with the Company's contracts.

At the turn of the 19th century, machine-made cloth in Lancashire began to replace the textiles of Bengal with cheaper industrial goods, not only in Britain, but in India itself. As a result, the spinners and weavers of Bengal fell into the greatest penury. Dacca, which had been, in the 17th century, capital of Bengal, richest province in the Mughal Empire, and which remained the centre of muslin production, became deserted: tigers and leopards roamed once-prosperous streets, and by the early 19th century, the city of men had become a city of animals. Weavers' dwellings were overgrown, the thatch alive with birds, snakes and insects, while roussettes - bats small and multi-coloured as butterflies - flew in and out of the mounds of earth that had been home; it was said that hunched vultures surveyed tracts of land in which the human voice was stilled. Whole families left Dacca, flowing in the opposite direction of today's migrants drawn to the irresistible lure of a choking megacity. People lost the skill of their fingers, and only the roughest-made country cloth still found a market among the poorest.

The first great de-industrialisation of the modern world had begun. The population of Dacca fell from several hundred thousand in 1760 to about 40,000 by the 1820s. By this time, Manchester reigned supreme. Bengal's abandonment of ancient artisanal crafts appears in our history as the story of Britain's progress and entrepreneurial genius. To the desolate weavers it meant the collapse of their world; and Bengal reverted to agriculture.

It seemed that Cottonopolis, as Manchester came to be known, had conquered the world, and by the 1820s, British exports had ousted the textiles of Bengal from European markets. The population was swelled by the uprooted of rural life: the dispossessed of enclosure, children who had stood barefoot in the stony fields scaring the crows from growing crops and who had carried pails of freezing water in their numb fingers, ran beside handcarts piled with rush-bottomed stools and a few household utensils, dreaming of a future that would never be theirs.

The satellite towns of Manchester - Oldham, Blackburn, Rochdale - produced not only for the domestic market, but for a growing imperial hinterland which would be forced to take goods from the 'workshop of the world.' Working and living conditions in Lancashire were worse than anything known to the countrified Persian-speaking metropolis of Dacca; soot and grime blackened the redbrick streets, while lint and dust entered the lungs of the cotton operatives; life expectancy in Manchester in the early 19th century was less than 20 years.  The German architect Karl Schinkel visited in 1825 and reported, 'The enormous factory buildings are seven to eight stories high.where three years ago these were only meadows.' De Tocqueville wrote in 1835, 'A sort of black smoke covers the city. Under this half-daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. The homes of the poor are scattered haphazard around the factories. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.'

In spite of the axiom that where there was muck there was brass, and notwithstanding Manchester's civic pride in the raising of great Victorian buildings and its yearning for status and culture, the apparent solidity of the Northern cities was more mutable than anything foreseen in the heyday of manufacture. Although by 1913, Manchester processed two-thirds of the world's cotton, with the First World War a long, slow decline began; a wastage that accelerated in the 1920s and 30s. The cotton industry was prolonged for one more generation after the Second World War by the import of cheap labour from the Indian sub-continent, including some people from a country which did not yet exist, Bangladesh.

By 1958, Britain was a net importer of cotton goods. The blight spread over Lancashire; mills fell into ruin; the great iron machinery of Platts of Oldham, Dobson and Barlow of Bolton, was shipped to 'Manchesters of the East' - Bombay, Kanpur, Ahmedabad. Now it was Manchester's turn to weep over the passing of industrial skills that had been acquired with such intense discipline, but which had created a distinctive voice and culture. Of course, the de-industrialisation of Lancashire was not accompanied by the wretchedness of Bengal: it occurred at a time of rising affluence. But it was not without social consequences, some grievous - the forfeit of a sense of function, a rooted place in a comprehensible division of labour. If the mill-towns were beset by crime, alienation, drugs, many of their most able people departed, leaving a residue of bitterness and loss. Even now they are still haunted by a memory of effaced purposes.

The disorientation of the sometime cotton operatives of Lancashire occurred simultaneously with the re-industrialisation of Bengal, or at least that part that had become Bangladesh. In the past 30 years, a garments industry has grown in Bangladesh even faster than the mushroom-city that was Manchester. Two thousand factories in Dhaka (the spelling was changed in 1982), almost four million workers in the country - these are kin to the people in Britain who left the impoverished livelihoods of a wasting rural life 200 years ago for the back-to-back tenements of Lancashire; young women in particular, whose river-eroded villages and alienated land have driven them to share rooms with half a dozen strangers in burning tin huts. They emerge each morning, briefly transforming Dhaka, crowded as never before, into a city of women, before they are swallowed up in the factories; returning home 12 hours later, the colour of their sarees dimmed by pale street lamps.

Dhaka - described by The Economist as the world's 'least liveable city' (after Damascus) - is restless and unsettled: unpaid wages send workers onto the streets, where they overturn vehicles, set fire to buses and smash factory windows. They are beaten, humiliated and fined, spied upon by company informers if they join trade unions. Fires have killed hundreds because of doors locked at night so no worker shall abscond, while the collapse of the Rana Plaza building last year, which killed at least 1,130 people, shows an unconcern for humanity that echoes Manchester's moment of industrialisation.

We have seen enough of industrial society to understand now the epic circularity of the dance of capital - from Bengal to Lancashire and back again to Bangladesh. Nor are Dhaka's assembly units proof against further change: although its garment workers are the lowest paid in the world, if cheaper labour should become available elsewhere, Bengal will once more present scenes of dereliction, as factories fall into ruin and lie in heaps of brick, broken masonry and splintered glass, like the remains of the Northern towns of Britain. Who knows, with declining incomes in Europe, might it not be worth the while of capital to recolonise the shell of Blackburn or Bolton with the ghosts of the industry that once made them the centre of the world?

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. This article is based on his forthcoming book The Song of the Shirt, to be published by Navayana(New Delhi) (see advertisement below).

*Third World Resurgence No. 283/284, Mar/Apr 2014, pp 70-71