The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes Across Continents and Centuries by Jeremy Seabrook – review

It is unlikely that Pope Francis and Dov Charney, the lubricious founder of American Apparel, agree on many issues. But on Rana Plaza, an eight-storey building in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka that collapsed in April last year, they were united: it was, they claimed, a temple of “slave labour”. There were more than 1,100 people killed and 2,500 injured on that terrible day. The majority of them were garment workers who toiled in cramped, unsafe conditions making clothes for international firms such as Primark, Walmart and Benetton. “Today in the world,” Pope Francis declared, “this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us – the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity.”

For Jeremy Seabrook, author of The Song of the Shirt, the tragedy of Rana Plaza is “a story of such appalling contempt for human life that it must rank among the most callous in the brutal history of industrialism”; but it was also predictable, the most vicious punishment meted out to the women who make up most of the employees in the 2,500 clothes factories located in Dhaka. At a conservative estimate, more than 500 workers have been incinerated in factory fires over the last decade. Some lived on the rooftops of the plants where they died. Others were unable to flee because their supervisors had locked the exit doors.

Who is to blame? Is it the multinational companies who, in a “race to the bottom”, scour the planet looking for ever-cheaper labour markets? According to a 2011 McKinsey report, garment workers are paid $1.66 (£1.05) an hour in China, 51 cents in India, 36 cents in Vietnam and 31 cents in Bangladesh. (Though Seabrook claims this is an overestimate.) Is it us westerners masking our greed and vanity with the wilfully blurry term “consumer demand”? For Seabrook, “the very term ‘demand’ takes precedence in the seemingly neutral equation of supply and demand; demand is imperious and dominant; supply, submissively responsive.”

Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital (on Delhi), Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats (on Patna): not a few exacting portraits of Asian cities have been published recently. In The Song of the Shirt (its title comes from an 1843 Thomas Hood poem), Dhaka is depicted as a place where “the workers are disposable, rags of humanity”. And yet, for all its darkness, it’s also a beacon for those displaced or demoralised by a rural life populated by the likes of “a woman transplanting rice seedlings, mining the gestures of her drowned sister in the waters of the paddy field; the woman beating sheaves of rice against the threshing stone; the man carrying his implements over his shoulder at the end of a long day hoeing and weeding on land he will never own; the family contemplating the eroded fields that will be deposited elsewhere as someone else’s fertile silt.”

Seabrook visits factories where he observes children as young asof 11, surrounded by piecework internationalism (Japanese machines, Pakistani flannel, Korean quilting), trimming and pressing garments in stifling heat. But he also journeys to Barisal City, a provincial town in the south of Bangladesh, to which people from the countryside head in the hope of making it next to Dhaka or Chittagong. The inhabitants of this waiting space, “poised between the rising ocean and the polluting brickfield”, have scarcely been touched by microcredit initiatives and development projects. The chants and poetry that were their birthright are now just “dying music in the flooded groves and abandoned orchards”.

Few writers – John Berger is a notable exception – are at once as lyrical or as precise about the living conditions of peasants and indigents. Seabrook’s clear-eyed accounts of the immiseration as well as the dreams of young Bangladeshis are informed by extended conversations with scholars and activists, as well as historical research. His short chapters – sometimes a mere three pages – read both like disgusted expectorations and fragments he is shoring up to counter the invisibility and inaudibility of these members of the global underclass.

What makes The Song of the Shirt especially important is its historical consciousness. What happened at Rana Plaza, to say nothing of less widely documented disasters, is shown to echo older calamities: the 1913 underground gas explosion at Senghenydd pit in South Wales that killed 439 miners and, after a protracted battle by trade unions, earned its owners a fine of £10; the 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York’s Greenwich Village in which 146 garment workers died. The plight of Dhaka’s near-sweatshop workers today is depicted as part of the “industrial terrorism” that capitalism has inflicted on men and women across the centuries.

For Seabrook, moreover, the disfiguring violence meted out to the Bangladeshi working classes in this era of globalisation duplicates that of the East India Company during imperialism. By the end of the 18th century, a region renowned for its skilled weavers and for the beauty of its fine muslins and silks, came under the cosh. Huge export taxes were placed on these fabrics, the cotton mills of Manchester became ascendant, and Dacca, increasingly derelict and depopulated, full of tigers and monkeys, had turned into a “city of animals”.

Seabrook draws out the social, economic and imaginative parallels that connected, across decades and continents, Europe’s and Asia’s poor. (During the industrial revolution, few Lancashire mill workers lived past the age of30.) He is alive, though, to the irony that Bengali peasants, forced to grow opium that found its way into teas, medicines and sedatives for noisy infants, helped render factory life “less harsh for the disaffected, and sometimes mutinous, workers of industrial Britain”.

In the foreword to The Unprivileged (1967), his history of working-class Northampton, Seabrook wrote: “This book deals with the falling into obsolescence and decay of a way of life once believed by those who shared it to be the only admissible form that human life could take.” In a similar vein, at the end of The Song of the Shirt, he notes: “If cheaper labour appears anywhere else in the world, the work they do will fly away, leaving empty the husks of the fragile, flammable buildings that once briefly held them captive.”

For half a century, in one delicately textured study after another, Seabrook has established himself as perhaps Britain’s finest anatomist of class, deindustrialisation, migration and the spiritual consequences of neoliberalism. The Song of the Shirt may well be his masterpiece.