The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy was assigned reading, the first true homework I've had in years. And just as I'm always promising my students, there was good value in the assignment.
Pietra Rivoli is a professor at Georgetown. In the late 1990s, she began serving on one of those ubiquitous university committees, this one devoted to ensuring that sweatshop labor did not produce any Georgetown apparel. She became curious about the origins and journeys of these seemingly simple articles of clothing; The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is the result of her curiosity.
The short version is that Pietra's shirt began life as cotton in West Texas before making its way to Asia to be spun into yarn, made into fabric, cut and sewn into shape, and shipped back to the U.S. for sale. Eventually it will likely end up as mitumba, most likely in Africa. Along the way, the shirt - or rather its various manufacturers - must navigate the various tariffs, quotas, and non-tariff barriers that dot the landscape of international trade.
I found the most interesting sections of this book to be those that focused on cotton farming, and particularly the evolution of the industry, especially in the U.S., and the section on mitumba, a practice with which I was only vaguely familiar before reading this book.
As I said at the beginning of this post, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy was homework. I ultimately enjoyed reading it, and would say that the readers most likely to do likewise are those with more than a passing interest in globalization and trade.
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