JEREMY Seabrook, one of the most vocal voices of labour today, in his latest book The Song of the Shirt, takes us to the bleak, almost surreal, world of Dhaka garment industry’s over 3,000 sweatshops. Tens of thousands of workers – 80 per cent of them women and children – labour here for long hours, in cramped and squalid conditions to eke out a subsistence existence. Many malnourished live on one meal a day, with diseases never far away and doctors beyond their reach. Nevertheless, for these workers, the only thing worse than these sweatshops is not to have them. Dhaka workers are victims “of globally systematic wrongs which the government of Bangladesh is powerless to address,” says the author. Why? Because the government itself, along with its pillars of financial and political support, is part of the global elite in the exploitation of the global poor. Accidents are common. In the 2013 building collapse in Dhaka, 110 were killed. International media hiccupped. Some facts got recorded. Few got to the roots of the accident. A hierarchy of stakeholders passed the onus to each other. The big masters of the junior stakeholders, Walmart in this instance, sat quiet. Ultimately both got away scot-free. It was the workers alone who paid the price with their lives. How did sovereign Dhaka, the proud capital of the richest province of the Mughal Empire in the 17th century, wherein even the common people were healthy and happy and well-fed, become an enslaved nation's 15 million strong “labour camp, masquerading as a city”? Its present state needs to be understood in its historical context and in its totality. The developing world, already impoverished by centuries of imperialism, is getting more and more sucked into the orbit – rather whirlpool – of the cruel new world order of western capitalism. Dacca, once known as the “queen of the cities of the east”, was one of the most flourishing textile centres of 18th century India. It had spacious gardens. Its muslins of superfine quality, perfected by generations of artisans, had been traded for centuries in Persia, Arabia, Armenia, China and Sumatra. Later, coveted by the European elite, its import banned by Britain, it was smuggled into England. On the quality of Dacca muslin the author quotes N K Sinha: “One of the best qualities of muslin was called ‘jungle khasa’… when spread over grass, it could not be distinguished from the dew on it.” A rare species of Bengali cotton that retained the right moisture in the hands of master craftsmen, created the finished product. The 1768 Census of Dacca mentioned that over six million people in Dacca were then dependent on the textile industry, apart from it being an item of household manufacture in peasant-cum-artisan homes, who flourished under the Mughal rule. People then spoke a mixture of languages as Bengali, Arabic and Hindustani, while Persian was the language of the elite. History of Dacca’s and India’s subjugation began from 1757 when the British East India Company got an armed territorial foothold in Bengal. Skilled weavers of the ‘subah’ soon came to be criminally exploited by the Company and its officials. Coerced to produce goods at very low rates as dictated by the Company, more often than not, artisans had to sell their goods at prices that were much below their cost of production. Later, consequent to the Industrial Revolution in Europe the British Company, keen to protect England’s infant textile industry, prohibited the normal production and export of Indian textiles. By 1820, Britain had succeeded in replacing Indian textiles with their own machine-made ones. By 1825, over 5,00,000 skilled workers had become unemployed in Dacca. By then Bengal economy had become fully subservient to that of England. Indigo, jute and opium, now monopolised by Britain, had become the Empire’s money-spinners. China was forced to legalise opium import after it lost the Second Opium War to Britain in 1858. In 1860, noted historian Irfan Habib writes, opium accounted for about one third of the value of India’s exports. Bengal under Company misrule also lost one third of its population during the famine of 1770. In 1889, European traveller Heber noted: “Two thirds of the vast area of Dacca are filled with ruins, some quite desolate, overgrown with jungle…” In 1840, Taylor noted: “Drains, ghats, lanes and bridges are neglected from want of funds to keep them in repair. Suburbs are overrun by jungle while the interior of the town is filled with stagnant canals and sinks, containing refuse animal and vegetable matters, which taint the water of neighbouring wells. Disease prevails… incurable maladies and infirmities of the most humiliating character are everywhere… a crowd of wretched, helpless objects, who procure a precarious subsistence by begging in the street." Rivers have always been known as the “lifeblood of Bangladesh”. Today, for the first time in history, people are flowing against the rivers to find livelihood in the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong. In late 18th century, tens of thousands of people had depended for their livelihood on rivers. Between 1990 and 2010, Dhaka was transformed from a place of "tightly embracing rivers to a washed out concrete jungle". The author draws eerie resemblances between the Dhaka of 1990s and Manchester and Leeds of 1820s and ’30s. By 1825, Manchester had buildings seven to eight storey’s high where just three years ago there were meadows. Thomas Hood’s famous 1843 The Song of the Shirt commemorated the short lives of Manchester's thousands of seamstresses who worked in similar condition, as those in Dhaka today: "Stitch — stitch — stitch, In poverty, hunger and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt." The industrial elite of England, that then controlled the country's government, exploited its textile and coal mine workers as tenaciously as did the subcontinent's colonial rulers then, and as would its own rulers in the independent subcontinent of India. A typical garment factory in today’s Dhaka is located in one floor of a rickety six-storey high building. Here over 3,000 workers are working on a floor space of 4,000 square metres. Cramped between rows of sewing machines, children 10 to 12 years old squat, feverishly cutting threads or trimming edges on finished garments. There is often a single barbed window. Air is stifling, fans do not cool. Rising at 4.30 in the morning, women and children start work at 8 am. Consignments of shirts for companies like Walmart have to be completed by targeted dates, often compelling workers to work 12 hours or even 24 hours. But however hard they work, they cannot make ends meet, for their wages are a pittance. According to a World Bank report of 2010, “Bangladesh today is the third largest garment exporter in the world after China and Turkey; workers are paid 1.66 dollar per hour in China, 56 cents in Pakistan, 51 cents in India, 44 cents in Indonesia, 36 cents in Vietnam and 31 cents in Bangladesh.” Refuting the above as an over estimate, the author asserts that “even after the rise in minimum wage for anyone working a 60-hour week the rate is around 18 cents an hour.” Hundreds have died in building collapses and fires in the past two years – 110 in the 2013 building collapse alone. Scores have been killed in the past decade when workers demonstrated for a better pay. A committed trade union movement does not exist. Either they are ineffective or controlled by western NGOs and consumer groups. About 10 per cent of parliamentarians in Bangladesh are factory owners. Owners and foreign buyers blame each other for pressure on workers but “their interlocking relationship ensures that both make enormous profits at workers’ expense”. Garment lords of Dhaka blame western brands but they themselves are obscenely, extravagantly rich. Their world is a restricted small one but they have resources equal to anything the global rich have. Eighty per cent of Bangladesh’s foreign exchange is today dependent upon a single industry – the garment industry. Its prime minister herself declared recently that “the government will not tolerate anarchism in the garment sector as this is the main source of foreign exchange in the country.” Dhaka’s garment factory owners have huge authority for they have representatives in the government and in policy-making. Both are as powerful as the British East India Company was earlier. It is always the weavers and workers who are squeezed to ensure the survival of the enterprise. Seabrook draws poignant images of capitalist development in today's Bangladesh. In many ways, it reflects the development pattern in India's big cities. Barisal, an old provincial town in southern Bangladesh, is today a halting place on the road to Chittagong or Dhaka, overcrowded with people who have lost land. Its slums are not expanding in space, though their population is increasing. Political parties control slums on government property, levy rent and chadda, which is illegal rent that goes to political mastaans or enforcers. Barisal is one of the provinces of globalisation where the iconography of global luxury most visibly shimmers on TV screens. It has no industry. Its biggest export are young women for the factories of Dhaka. At Amanathonganj, a slum in Barisal, prowl unemployed young men, possessed by other hungers than those of the empty belly. To them mobile phones are a necessity. Frustrated and bored they are ready for recruitment in groups of religious extremists. Many will learn that pride is no longer an affordable luxury and will rent one of the detested cycle-rickshaws. There are already over 1,400 licensed rickshaws, far too many for the town's needs. They will then pedal away their youth. Men old at forty. The only fate worse than driving the rickshaw is to be unable to do so, since begging is the next step on the road to destitution. This city of starvelings also has a comfortable middle class. At Gutia, 20 kilometres from Barisal stands a magnificent mosque of recent construction, financed by a former mayoral candidate for Barisal. Of overwhelming opulence, its dome and minarets are inlaid with marble and semi-precious stones. It has large beautiful gardens where the well-off assemble. A small factory near the mosque has children younger than 10 years of age. Mintu and his brother, who had the advantage of possessing some land, ie capital, in the family are amongst the few who "succeeded" in Barisal. Mintu operates in a way similar to that of the gumashtas or agents of the British East India Company. Beneath him is an equally complex hierarchy of official procurers and supervisors. The latter superintend the production of orders for which he is answerable to the foreign company who employs him. He frequently flies to his company's headquarters in Manchester. His brother works in an international hotel chain. Both continue to live in Barisal. There are other contrasts between Mughal Barisal and the contemporary one. In the 18th century, Barisal grew the famous 'Balam rice' that gave its name to golden Bengal. It is vanished now, wiped out by high yielding varieties that made most small farmers landless, for they could not keep up with the gargantuan appetite of miracle seeds for fertilizers. Rivers once teeming with fish that provided cheap protein to the poor become poisoned with pesticides. Barisal is also the place where once an eclectic culture of Sufism, Hinduism and Bengali folk culture flourished, long ago in pre-colonial centuries. There are equally heart-rending images of Murshidabad, the once rich and magnificent capital of later day Mughal Bengal, where an equally plural culture once flourished. Under the British, Calcutta replaced Dacca and Murshidabad as the capital. The European section of the city called, the White Town, came to have large luxurious houses, while the Indian section of the city, called the Black Town, was in Heber's words, "dirty, bleak and dingy with narrow crooked streets". There was also a significant 'Grey Town', in between the two, where Anglo-Indians, Persians, Arabs, Jews, Greeks and Gujrati banias lived. By the 1830's the banias had acquired zamindari and built conspicuous establishments in Calcutta. These rentier-turned-aristocrats -- the ancestors of today's Mullicks, Dattas, Tagores and others -- left fortunes. By the second half of the 19th century, their descendants made Calcutta the intellectual capital of India. Its bhadralok and chotolok or small folk lived in different worlds. Labour for the new factories was drawn from the vast hinterlands of Bengal and Bihar. Many workers' strikes occurred. But there was no solidarity, nor a single strong organisation. While the bhadralok were a solid block, the labouring poor, though a vast majority, were fractured among communal caste or linguistic lines. A Communist government, largely of progressive bhadralok origin, would come to power only in the last quarter of the 20th century. The worker in the western world did not get a secure livelihood on a platter. In England, in the 17th and 18th centuries draconian laws were passed to intimidate the poor and to grab their land. The most notorious of these laws passed by the House of Commons in the 1720's, without a murmur of protest, prescribed gallows for over 200 offences. One could be hanged for poaching a rabbit or even for burning an insignificant pile of straw. The first quarter of the 19th century also saw the erection of many mills in Manchester. Tocqueville described one as a "place where 1,500 workers labouring 69 hours a week, with an average wage of 11 shillings, and where three quarters of the workers are women and children". In the early days of industrialisation in Britain, laws had been enacted even amongst unions. It took three quarters of a century to limit the employment of 10 year olds to six hours a day. Even these improvements were entirely due to the combined and sustained struggles of the British workers themselves. The task for the people of the developing countries is perhaps even harder. They have to wrest their liberty today "not from the paraphernalia of imperial occupation but from the apparently impregnable fortresses of Capital which faithfully replicate the vanished pomp of territorial empires". This brilliantly written book, full of rare visual imagery and poetic metaphor, is a must read for every Indian who desires to understand the effects of neo-liberal globalisation in the developing world, and the inhuman price the global poor are paying for the luxuries of the global elite.