The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh - Softcover

Jeremy Seabrook is the author of more than forty books on subjects as diverse as transnational prostitution, child labor, social class, ageing, unemployment and poverty. His most recent include People Without History, a report from India's Muslim slums, and The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the Flight from Tyranny, a study of academic refugees between 1933 and the present day.

"The sweat and blood of Bangladeshi garment workers is woven into the very fabric of our daily lives. Seabrook, as he always has, delivers a brilliantly written jeremiad with an urgent moral message"-- Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

"Few writers 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. EL What makes The Song of the Shirt especially important is its historical consciousness. EL Seabrook draws out the social, economic and imaginative parallels that connected, across decades and continents, Europe's and Asia's poor. EL Seabrook has established himself as perhaps Britain's finest anatomist of class, deindustrialization, migration and the spiritual consequences of neoliberalism. The Song of the Shirt may well be his masterpiece." -- The Guardian

"What distinguishes this book is its deep historical consciousness...stitches together history, folklore and hundreds of encounters with individual Bangladeshis to give a thorough picture of the structural injustices that have led to the present situation." -- The New Statesman

"At once illuminating, deeply absorbing, and sobering, this is an ode to the 'rags of humanity' -- the laborers, young and old -- who sometimes perish in order to create our fashionably casual clothes. It's written by one who's long been intimate with this part of the world and its anonymous dwellers, and who has responded always with passion and eloquence."-- Amit Chaudhuri, author of Calcutta: Two Years in the City

"In this short yet compelling book, Seabrook skillfully weaves together tales of peasants with stories of weavers, moving back and forth between the village and the city, water and land, lush green fields and the ramshackle appearance of South Asia's urban patches, even the poetic and the idioms of history. He is versed in historical sources but not burdened by them; and only someone with the sensibility of a poet can ruminate on the strange interplay of fire and water that has shaped the contours of the lives of his subjects. EL Seabrook has accomplished the enviable task of rendering naked the social processes which have helped to clothe the world and disguise some unpalatable truths about the treacherousness of what is usually celebrated as entrepreneurial capitalism." -- The Indian Express

"Jeremy Seabrook puts together stitch by stitch, thread by thread, a stark picture of garment manufacturing in Bangladesh. EL Seabrook places his riveting narrative in historical context --making the link with the fires that abound in present-day Dhaka's treacherous factories and the pauperization of 18th century Dhaka weavers because of brutal colonial policies. EL A searing anger pervades Seabrook's text. Every industrial 'accident' in 19th century England and 21st century Bangladesh is brought out of the archives. Stitched into this narrative, one gets the larger picture of disdain and disregard for the lives of the working poor." -- Outlook India