The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy . . . how can 336 pages about the microeconomic look at how a t-shirt is made (from the beginnings of the US cotton industry to the cotton mills of yesteryear to sweatshops in Asia) and how the history of t-shirt production can be a good way of looking at globalization and the effects of free trade NOT be awesome.

Yes, markets and percentages of GDP and currency fluctuation and Cold War vs Globalization can be confusing if you’re not an MBA student (or hell, sometimes even if you are), but Pietra Rivoli does a pretty decent job offering a narrative that most anyone can understand what she’s talking about.

The big question is – even if you get what she’s talking about, will you find it interesting? Good question. The book starts off a little slow with a specific, detailed, micro look at the cotton industry and its origins in the United States, but really does make you sit back and think about where the t-shirt on your back came from. Whose sweat is responsible for that? Why did the US dominate the cotton industry? Some truths are tragic, others make you realize how great our country has become.

Cotton subsidies, yeah they screw over poor farmers in Africa who don’t have US subsidies and university resources, but at the same time, these poor African countries have their countries working against them (rather than for them as in the US). Sure the US cotton industry came about because of free labor in the form of slavery, but look at what’s it’s developed into and the people its helped.

The poor conditions of US cotton mills matched the poor conditions of British cotton mills decades before and holds a surprising resemblance to cotton mills in Asia at the moment. Are these Asian cotton mills entirely horrible if they eventually lead to skill enhancement and better lives (in the long run) for its people? In Britain and the US, cotton mills led to child labor laws and fair employment laws – whose to say that what led to the independence and well-being of so many people won’t lead to the same for their present-day counterparts?


The author does a great job of remaining impartial – instead of telling the reader that Chinese sweatshops are horrible or that using slavery to advance the cotton industry is bad bad bad – she lets you draw your own conclusion. These things are bad on a humane level, but they led/can lead to greater things.