Textile Industry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The textile industry is the world’s oldest branch of consumer goods manufacturing and covers the entire production chain of transforming natural and chemical fibers (such as cotton, wool, and oil) into end-user goods, including garments, household goods, and industrial textiles. In the twelfth century China already produced cotton and fabrics. In the early seventeenth century India and Japan had domestic cotton industries. Modern textile manufacturing originated in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution around 1780. The mechanization of spinning and weaving alongside a rising demand for clothing from the colonies contributed to the growth of “king cotton.” In the early nineteenth century textile production spread from Britain over western Europe and the United States. Ever since that time, the textile industry has been one of the most competitive and geographically dispersed industries across the world.

Accounting for 5.6 percent of world trade flows and employing at least twenty million workers worldwide, the modern textile industry is a significant economic sector. Despite its geographical dispersion, large concentrations of textile production can be found in China, followed by India, the United States, the Russian Federation, Japan, and western Europe. Since the 1970s a gradual shift of production has taken place to newly industrializing countries in East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, eastern Europe, and North Africa.

The textile industry is typically the leading sector of industrialization. Usually, textiles manufacturing is labor intensive and employs relatively low skills and simple technologies. Moreover the capital investment needed is only modest in comparison with other types of industry. Some developing countries also benefit from local supplies of raw materials (e.g., cotton) that foster the development of textiles production. Thanks to low labor costs, the newly industrializing countries have become fierce competitors for producers in Europe and North America. This rivalry, combined with saturated home markets, has induced corporate restructuring in the European Union and the United States, making the textile industry progressively an industry of large, transnational corporations.

Growing competitive pressure has led to a variety of corporate strategies in American and European textiles. Some companies attempt to cut costs by producing standardized goods that benefit from economies of scale. Other firms pursue offshore strategies and relocate part of their operations to low-labor-cost countries. Most producers, however, choose for focused differentiation: They search for market niches where specialized goods can be sold for a premium price. For that purpose many textile firms invest in quality improvement, innovation, design, marketing, and retailing. Some of the firms also focus on the production of technical textiles (e.g., artificial grass). All these differentiation strategies ask for sophisticated skills, knowledge of local markets, and flexible production facilities. Textile firms increasingly have to cope with a trade-off between labor costs and the need for market proximity.

Since the 1960s governments in western Europe and America have protected domestic textile producers by means of trade arrangements. After the Long-Term Arrangement in 1962, the Multi-Fibre Agreement was negotiated in 1973. The aim of both agreements was to create an “orderly” development of global textiles trade— not only for developed but also for developing countries— by restricting imports that “disrupted” domestic markets. In practice merely the European and North American nations profited from the rules, because in most cases the cheap exports from developing countries were considered to be disruptive for the matured textile industry in the developed world. However, thanks to World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, which aim for nondis-crimination between all trading partners, and following a ten-year transition period (1995–2004), the global textile industry is liberalizing more and more. The protectionist strategies of older, established textile nations and the lack of attention of transnational firms for good labor and environmental circumstances at offshore locations are often criticized. Further liberalization should contribute to an improvement of these conditions in the textile industry across the globe.

SEE ALSO Industrialization; World Trade Organization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abernathy, William, John Dunlop, John Hammond, and David Weil. 1999. A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing: Lessons from the Apparel and Textile Industries. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dicken, Peter. 2003. Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the Twenty-first Century. 4th ed. London: Sage.

World Trade Organization. 2005. International Trade Statistics 2004. Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization.

Gert-Jan Hospers

Textile Industry. American colonists hand‐produced textiles for various purposes. The English first devised textile‐manufacturing machinery, and Samuel Slater, an English mill overseer who immigrated to America, successfully produced cotton yarn at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, mill in 1790. As was to be the case repeatedly, Slater's success rested on the contributions of a community of inventors, machinists, laborers and financial backers. Relying on the employment of families, the “putting‐out system” to weave yarn in area homes, and the development of corporate villages, the Slater system spread throughout New England. Entrepreneurs in Philadelphia, New York City, and other cities employed skilled labor to produce short runs of expensive specialty materials such as fashion goods and upholstery, gradually moving from hand to factory production.

A group of merchants known as the Boston Associates created a third style of production, first at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, and then at Lowell, Massachusetts, and other single‐purpose industrial cities across New England. Building large, integrated factories and installing water‐powered looms that processed raw cotton into vast quantities of coarse cloth, they hired rural young women to tend machines requiring minimal skills. With large‐scale capital investment, and aided by state governments, these corporations harnessed major waterpower sites.

Each type of textile production endured decades of strife between management seeking profit and labor attempting to negotiate acceptable terms and conditions for the new ways of work. In mill villages, some accommodation was necessary to maintain production with limited human resources on both sides of the dispute, although the owners' preponderance of power gave them an advantage. Skilled producers of specialty goods and their bosses, sharing the culture and rewards of production, generally adapted pay, hours, and profits to mutually acceptable levels. In the large single‐industry cities, employers refused to make concessions, and successive groups of workers—Yankees, Irish, French‐Canadians, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—all rejected conditions and left the mills at the first opportunity, with no reconciliation of conflicting interests.

Though northern textile mills and specialty production survived well into the twentieth century, the New South desired to industrialize to make both cloth and profits more easily by shifting their investments away from the circumstances and taxes (e.g., workers' compensation and unemployment insurance) their manner of operation had created. By 1900, the capital generated by northern textile workers was financing southern branches of established mills and new mills founded by southerners. Textile‐machinery builders and cloth‐marketing agents, taking stock instead of cash from southern mills, came to control many of them. American industry thus began its perpetual search for easier, cheaper venues in which to operate.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the industry faced intense competition from cheaper producers abroad, especially Asia. Total employment in U.S. textile mills fell from 1.2. million in 1950 to under 700,000 in 1990.
See also Clothing and Fashion; Cotton Industry; Factory System; Global Economy, America and the; Immigrant Labor; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Lowell Mills; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Philip Scranton , Figured Tapestry, 1989.
Laurence F. Gross , The Course of Industrial Decline, 1993.

Laurence F. Gross