The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

In February 1999, Pietra Rivoli, a business professor at Georgetown University, watched approximately 100 students rally against globalization, sweatshops, and corporate exploitation. A young woman challenged the crowd to consider who made their T-shirts, describing alleged conditions of child labor, poverty wages, and squalor. Rivoli, who initially assumed the protester did not understand the benefits of free trade, decided to investigate. She purchased a white T-shirt for $5.99 at a Walgreen's drugstore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and spent years tracing its life story across three continents. Her central finding was that the key events in the T-shirt's life were shaped less by competitive markets than by politics, history, and creative maneuvers to avoid competition. She framed this through the concept of the "double movement," introduced by the political economist Karl Polanyi, in which market forces on one side were met by demands for social protection on the other. She argued that the unintended interplay between these two forces holds the most promise for improving the human condition.

The T-shirt's label read "Made in China," but Rivoli traced its cotton to west Texas, where Nelson Reinsch, a farmer in his late eighties, and his wife Ruth farm approximately 1,000 acres near Lubbock. The United States has dominated global cotton for over 200 years. Oxfam and poor cotton-producing nations charged that U.S. subsidies block their route out of poverty, and in 2004 the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that these subsidies violated global trade rules. Rivoli argued, however, that subsidies alone cannot explain American dominance, which predates them by over a century and rests equally on a "virtuous circle" of collaboration among farmers, universities, government agencies, and private companies.

Rivoli traced this dominance to the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain, when mechanized textile production created explosive demand for raw cotton. U.S. production increased 25-fold in the decade after 1791, fueled by slavery, the first major public policy insulating growers from labor market risks. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, invented in 1793, broke the bottleneck of separating Upland cotton from its sticky seeds, enabling massive growth but entrenching the plantation system. After the Civil War, sharecropping replaced slavery as the mechanism binding labor to the land. In the 20th century, successive waves of innovation transformed west Texas cotton: tractors in the 1920s, the federal Bracero program (1942–1964) supplying Mexican laborers under government-guaranteed terms, the mechanical cotton stripper in the 1950s, chemical defoliants, and genetically modified seed introduced commercially in 1996. West Texas farmers also captured value through cooperatively owned gins, cottonseed oil mills, and warehouses. Under the 2002 Farm Bill, cotton farmers received payments bringing minimum income to 72.24 cents per pound even as world prices ranged between 44 and 61 cents.

Rivoli contrasted this virtuous circle with "vicious circles" in West Africa, where 18 million farmers face corruption, state-controlled monopolies, and a lack of education or infrastructure. Technologies benefiting U.S. growers can backfire without supporting institutions: A Cornell University study found that Chinese farmers planting Bt cotton, a genetically modified variety designed to resist pests, were spending more on pesticides and earning less than conventional growers by 2004 as secondary pest populations overwhelmed them. In India's Andra Pradesh region, more than 500 cotton farmers died by suicide after worms destroyed their crops, dealers furnished the wrong pesticides at usurious interest rates, and farmers had no government support.

Reinsch's cotton traveled from Lubbock to Long Beach, California, then by ship to Shanghai, where it was spun into yarn, knitted into cloth, and sewn into a T-shirt. Rivoli traced the historical "race to the bottom" in textile production from Britain through New England, the American South, Japan, and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan), showing that at each stop the industry was powered by cheap, abundant labor. Each region that lost the race subsequently moved to higher-value industries. By the late 1970s, China, with wages approximately 90 percent lower than Hong Kong's, had millions of young women eager to leave the farm.

China's hukou, or household registration system, devised in the 1950s, restricts rural citizens from becoming permanent urban residents. Migrant workers bring their labor to cities but cannot access subsidized housing, education, or healthcare. Despite these hardships, young women overwhelmingly chose the factory over the farm. Rivoli drew parallels across centuries, from mill girls in 1840s New England to garment workers in modern Shenzhen, showing that factory work offered economic autonomy and choices impossible in rural life. The factory experience gradually eroded workers' passivity as they pursued education and asserted their rights, becoming better workers for the expanding industries that follow textiles.

Rivoli argued that market forces and labor activism functioned as an "unwitting conspiracy" improving conditions over time. Bans on child labor evolved from radical notion to mainstream law over more than a century. Corporate codes of conduct became nearly universal after Nike, which in the mid-1990s denied responsibility for supplier conditions, reversed course. At Georgetown, students successfully pressured the university to adopt supplier codes of conduct and independent factory monitoring. Rivoli also examined environmental concerns, noting that a Cambridge University study found consumer behavior, such as switching from a dryer to a clothesline, determines the climate impact of a T-shirt far more than the location of production.

The T-shirt's journey home revealed a protectionist regime of extraordinary complexity. In 2008, cotton T-shirts from non-preferential countries faced a 16.5 percent import tariff. A succession of "temporary" trade arrangements, from Voluntary Export Restraints with Japan in the 1950s through the Multifiber Agreement (MFA) governing trade from 1974 onward, each expanded in scope. The consequences proved perverse: Mechanization, not imports, drove most U.S. job losses, while quotas encouraged exporting countries to upgrade products, triggered globe-hopping by manufacturers, and unintentionally served as foreign aid to small developing countries. When quotas expired on January 1, 2005, Chinese imports surged, but the Bush administration reimposed limits days after using textile concessions to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by a margin of 217 to 215. Rivoli drew a historical parallel to seventeenth-century England, where Parliament's ban on cheap Indian cotton calicoes unintentionally incubated a domestic cotton industry and spurred innovations that helped launch the Industrial Revolution.

In its final stage, the T-shirt encountered its only genuine free market. Between 1995 and 2007, the United States exported nearly 9 billion pounds of used clothing to over 100 countries. Ed Stubin, whose family firm Trans-Americas Trading Company has operated for over 60 years, sorts donated clothing into more than 400 categories. In Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, the mitumba (used clothing) trade has flourished since import liberalization in 1985. Geofrey Milonge, who arrived from the countryside in the early 1990s, built his business from a single bale purchased on credit to seven shops. Rivoli countered critics who said mitumba destroys local textile industries, arguing that African factories were already failing due to poor governance and that the trade creates significant entrepreneurial opportunity.

Rivoli concluded that the most vulnerable people suffered more from exclusion from political participation and market opportunities than from market competition itself. She contended that neither markets nor activists alone held much promise, but that the double movement between them did. In an Epilogue covering 2009 to 2014, she provided updates: The 2014 Farm Bill replaced several cotton subsidy programs with a subsidized crop insurance plan; the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh killed 1,129 garment workers, prompting new safety accords; China's share of U.S. apparel imports reached 41 percent by 2013 but rising wages slowed growth; and competitors including Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia emerged in the post-quota era.