A new angle on the globalisation debate, which celebrates successful resistance as well as exploring the dangers. As languages and local cultures are swept away by the market-driven monoculture, Jeremy Seabrook looks at the threat to cultural diversity and integrity all around the globe, including in western societies. Amongst the disappearing cultures, Seabrook finds that resistance is breaking out as people rediscover the imprtance of the local and the value of community.
Oh, Men, with Sisters dear! Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you're wearing out, But human creatures' lives! Stitch - stitch - stitch, In poverty, hunger and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt. -from "The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood (1843) In April 2013 Rana Plaza, an unremarkable eight-story commercial block in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,129 people and injuring over 2,000. Most of them were low paid textile workers who had been ordered to return to their cramped workshops the day after ominous cracks were discovered in the building's concrete structure. Rana Plaza's destruction revealed a stark tragedy in the making: of men (in fact mostly women and children) toiling in fragile, flammable buildings who provide the world with limitless cheap garments - through Walmart, Benetton and Gap - and bring in 70% of Bangladesh's foreign exchange. In elegiac prose, Jeremy Seabrook investigates the disproportionate sacrifices demanded by the manufacture of such throwaway items as baseball caps and sweatshirts. He also traces the intertwined histories of workers in what is now Bangladesh, and Lancashire. Two hundred years ago the former were dispossessed of ancient skills and their counterparts in Lancashire forced into labour settlements; in a ghostly replay of traffic in the other direction, the decline of Britain's textile industry coincided with Bangladesh becoming one of the world's major clothing exporters. The two examples offer mirror images of impoverishment and affluence. With capital becoming more protean than ever, it won't be long before global business, in its nomadic cultivation of profit, relocates mass textile manufacture to an even cheaper source of labour than Bangladesh, with all too predictable consequences for those involved.
In 1797 Jeremy Bentham prepared a map of poverty in Britain, which he called "Pauperland." More than two hundred years later, poverty and social deprivation remain widespread in Britain. Yet despite the investigations into poverty by Mayhew, Booth, and in the 20th century, Townsend, it remains largely unknown to, or often hidden from, those who are not poor. Pauperland is Jeremy Seabrook's account of the mutations of poverty over time, historical attitudes to the poor, and the lives of the impoverished themselves, from early Poor Laws till today. He explains how in the medieval world, wealth was regarded as the greatest moral danger to society, yet by the industrial era, poverty was the most significant threat to social order. How did this change come about, and how did the poor, rather than the rich, find themselves blamed for much of what is wrong with Britain, including such familiar-and ancient-scourges as crime, family breakdown and addictions? How did it become the fate of the poor to be condemned to perpetual punishment and public opprobrium, the useful scapegoat of politicians and the media? Pauperland charts how such attitudes were shaped by ill-conceived and ill-executed private and state intervention, and how these are likely to frame ongoing discussions of and responses to poverty in Britain.
This book takes its readers on a voyage of discovery. Here is modern Bangladesh: the life of its villages, its farms and fields, its city slums and elites, its waterways, its cultural heritage and the diversity of Bengali tradition all threatened by the emergence of a less tolerant version of Islam.Day labourers and rickshaw drivers, maidservants and prostitutes, child labourers and garment workers, landlords and politicians, criminals and students, all engage us in their lives. We range through the watery landscapes of Barisal to the plains of North Bengal and the hills of Chittagong. We visit the strongholds of fundamentalism. And we also meet women fighting for education, as well as idealists and freedom fighters.The author shows how political struggle has now turned into a desperate battle for the spirit of Bengal, which has become a battleground between the liberal humanism of a rooted Bengali culture and the disciplined austerities of Islam. The tension between the contending forces gives this book a powerful resonance that goes far beyond the specifics of Bangladesh to wherever there is conflict between traditional cultures and the forces of globalism.
At the turn of the new millennium, the United Nations determined that world poverty would be halved by 2015. International agencies are all committed to "poverty abatement." The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have renamed their structural adjustment policies "poverty reduction strategies." But can this work? No, argues Jeremy Seabrook, not if we fail to understand the meaning of poverty. Drawing on testimonies from around the world, as well as on the hard facts, he challenges the assumption that wealth overcomes poverty, and demonstrates that the opposite of "poor" is not "rich" but "self-reliant." Appealing passionately for a shared sense of "sufficiency," he gives verbal snapshots of people's lives to show how poverty shifts, changes and endures in response to the growth of wealth.
With globalization, traditional societies are being replaced by an international working class and a small minority of the global rich. In such a situation, who is to guarantee social justice?
Jeremy Seabrook has a rare ability to listen, to observe and to record faithfully, which complements his grasp of political and economic realities. Above all, his writing here is indelibly marked by a sense of solidarity which is neither sentimental nor rhetorical. The result is not only a series of unforgettable portraits and stories, but a profoundly important study of social transformation.
Labour in Bangladesh flows like its rivers--in excess of what is required. Often, both take a huge toll. Labour that costs $1.66 an hour in China and 52 cents in India can be had for a song in Bangladesh -- 18 cents. It is mostly women and children working in fragile, flammable buildings who bring in 70 per cent of the country's foreign exchange. Bangladesh today does not clothe the nakedness of the world, but provides it with limitless cheap garments -- through Primark, Walmart, Benetton, Gap. In elegiac prose, Jeremy Seabrook dwells upon the disproportionate sacrifices demanded by the manufacture of such throwaway items as baseball caps. He shows us how Bengal and Lancashire offer mirror images of impoverishment and affluence. In the eighteenth century, the people of Bengal were dispossessed of ancient skills and the workers of Lancashire forced into labour settlements. In a ghostly replay of traffic in the other direction, the decline of the British textile industry coincided with Bangladesh becoming one of the world's major clothing exporters. With capital becoming more protean than ever, it wouldn't be long before the global imperium readies to shift its sites of exploitation in its nomadic cultivation of profit.
In a series of interviews spanning the 20th century, people talk about what work - or the lack of it - means to them. The voices of coachmen, bootmakers, servants and steel workers are echoed in the conversations of truck drivers, print-shop workers, hairdressers and redundant miners. These life stories reveal connections between work and identity, and raise questions about what happens to that identity when work becomes ever more elusive.
Examines the connections between development, economic growth, social justice and the environment - not in theory, but as this tangle of relationships affects people in their daily lives. The author describes the experience and struggles of people all over the world.
The need to produce food without the destructive chemical horrors of much modern farming, for an intelligent use of dwindling natural resources and for humane forms of production is universal, the practice is limited. This book is an account of one, large, instance of success in practice. Twenty-five years ago, Winin Pereira, a nuclear physicist abandoned academia to start a co-operative farm at Alonde in a tribal area north of Bombay. The group experienced, and finally discarded, all the false hopes and promises of Western originated forms of development: ploughs that ploughed too deep, irrigation systems that lowered water tables, fertilizers and pesticides which managed the earth and became so expensive that poorer farmers were dispossessed. Instead they learnt from the adivasai, or tribal people, who have nurtured or been nurtured by foresets for millennia, ways of applying popular knowledge to contemporary problems. This book is a combination of Pereira's record of achievement of sustainable livelihoods and an account of the farm and its effect on the India around it by a leading British journalist. Originally published in 1991
This is the story of my mother, who, in 1939, discovered her husband was suffering from tertiary syphilis – an affliction which could be cured then only by long years of treatment. The horror with which syphilis was surrounded was similar to that provoked by HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. My mother was childless at this time. Instead of being destroyed by this news, she resolved to have children anyway with a man she would choose. Her decision resulted in the birth of twins – my brother, who died ten years ago, and myself. This book is about the courage of a determined woman, and the consequences, for her and her children, of her will to survive.
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