Review: Flip-flop: a journey through globalization's backroads

Abstract

I’ve known Caroline Knowles for a number of years and from time to time I’ve heard accounts of her research trips to Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Once I emailed her and got a reply from a rubbish tip outside Addis Ababa where she was busy with interviewees. She doesn’t stick to the safest, most comfortable routes on a trail, and she is more intrepid than her university will allow her to be. The trail she’s been following is the life cycle of the flip-flop, and the results have recently been published. In Flip-Flop: a Journey through Globalisation’s Backroads she tracks the manufacture of the flip-flop, from the plastic’s liquid source in the Kuwaiti oilfields to the petrochemical factories of South Korea, where polyethylene and other thermoplastic resins are made, to be shipped onwards to China and the flip-flop factories around the city of Fuzhou. China has ten major container ports from which some fifteen million tons of manufactured goods are transported annually worldwide. From their forty-odd destinations Caroline chose Ethiopia as her endpoint; it’s a significant importer of flip-flops and now also produces its own (and has even started making shoes for export to Italy). That huge rubbish tip outside Addis Ababa is where the worn out articles end their days, there to be rescued (and sold for recycling) by large numbers of scavengers – modern-day chiffoniers who depend on their pickings for a livelihood, risking injury as they vie with the bulldozers. Whether it’s the scale of Chinese shipping, the economic background to piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the chemistry of plastics or the mechanised processes of production, Caroline is punctilious in mapping the global traces of this lowly and low-cost product. The flip-flop does have its variations in quality and styling and can even be a pricey designer purchase, while at the same time being distinguished as the first form of footwear for many of the world’s poor who hitherto went barefoot. Her book offers many insights into the chain of connections required for it to reach African market stalls and European or US department stores. The book’s real heart, however, lies in its probing of what all this means for the lives