Capitalist crisis and the geography of the clothing industry

Abstract

This article aims to analyse how the map of clothing manufacturing has changed since the 2008 financial crash. In doing so I look at global and intra-regional trade statistics before and after 2008. Here, I challenge the long-standing dominance of Global Commodity Chains and Global Value Chains approaches in debates about the geography of the clothing industry. These approaches fail to explain processes beyond regions and firms directly linked to global production networks, like the rise of ‘local sweatshops’ in large cities in core economies and the deindustrialisation caused by the globalisation of production in peripheral countries not linked to these networks. Here, global production networks are considered as one particular way of organising production, or, in Harvey’s terms, a ‘spatial fix’ coexisting with other spatial fixes developed by capital in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Rather inspired by recently reanimated debates on uneven development, I address changes in the map of clothing manufacturing by emphasising broader processes of capital accumulation and circulation. More specifically, I look at the effects of the capitalist crisis, the eastward shift in globalisation – evidenced primarily by the rise of Chinese economy – trade tensions, declining labour supply and rising labour costs across Southern and SE Asia on corporate spatial strategies. The emphasis on meso-level processes and connections, therefore, helps address politically important questions about possible future trajectories of garment manufacturing and supply in and beyond global production networks.