The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.

The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.

The end of the Cold War and the virtual disappearance of communism have completely altered the world economy. The supply chains of supermarkets and consumer goods industries have spread ever more widely and deeply into Asia, Africa and South America, while oil, mining and financial companies, among many others, have invested heavily in countries that were previously denied to them by political or ideological barriers. While companies have seized the opportunities presented by globalisation, they have in many cases been completely unprepared for the risks presented by their headlong rush into these new markets. Companies have found themselves and their business partners operating in countries where corruption, injustice, internal conflict and human rights violations are rife. An increasingly alert and critical world has acted as watchdog, highlighting corporate malpractice and the links between corporations and repressive regimes. It has increasingly been argued that companies have responsibilities for the protection and promotion of human rights. These arguments are, at least to some extent, accepted by companies. Yet, despite the increasing use of human rights language in public policy discourses, the expectations of companies remain unclear. That is, what are the ethical imperatives? What are the legal expectations? How far does responsibility extend? What can companies actually do in practice? The debate is further complicated by the range of actors (companies, governments, international institutions, local communities, non-governmental organisations [NGOs], trade unions, consumers) involved; by debates around free trade versus and fair trade; by the discussion of the specific role of governments; and by questions about the relative merits of regulation and self-regulation. Business and Human Rights provides an analysis of the relationship between companies and human rights in the context of globalisation. The analysis is in two parts. The first maps the reasons (financial, ethical, regulatory) why human rights have become a business issue. However, simply because there are reasons why companies should be concerned about human rights, this does not say what companies should or could do. Therefore, the second part of the book looks at the practical experiences of companies in responding to specific human rights issues in the context of their own operations, in their supply chains and in specific countries. These case studies, many of which have not been previously published or analysed from the perspective of human rights, provide important insights into questions such as: How do companies organise themselves to respond to human rights challenges? What have the experiences been-positive and negative? How have companies responded to specific situations? What are the roles and responsibilities of other actors: government, trade unions, NGOs? What are the limits to responsibility? In this outstanding collection, Rory Sullivan has drawn together leading thinkers and actors from the debate on business and human rights, to establish how far the business and human rights debate has evolved, and explore the many complex questions around roles, responsibilities and solutions that remain to be answered.

The apparel and textile industries have always been at the mercy of rapidly changing styles and fickle customers who want the latest designs while they are still in fashion. The result for these businesses, often forced to forecast sales and order from suppliers with scant information about volatile demand, is a history of stock shortages, high inventories, and costly markdowns. But, as the authors explain in A Stitch in Time, technological advances in the 1980s paved the way for a new concept in retailing--lean retailing. Pioneered by companies like WAL-MART, lean retailing has reshaped the way that products are ordered, virtually eliminating delays from distribution center to sales rack by drawing on sales data captured electronically at the checkout counter. Armed with up-to-the-minute data about colors, sizes, styles, and geographic sales, apparel and textile companies now must be able to respond rapidly to real-time orders efficiently based on new approaches to distributing merchandise, forecasting, planning, organizing production, and managing supplier relations. A Stitch in Time shows that even in the face of burgeoning product proliferation, companies that successfully adapt to the world of lean retailing can reduce inventory risk, reduce costs, and increase profitability while improving their responsiveness to the ever-changing tastes of customers. Based on the success of these practices in the apparel industry, lean retailing practices are propagating through a growing number of consumer product industries. A richly detailed and resonant account, A Stitch in Time brilliantly captures both the history and future of the retail-apparel-textile channel and offers bold insights on the changes and challenges facing retailers and manufacturers in all segments of our rapidly changing economy.

This book puts Indian garment workers and their organisations at the centre of the analysis. Taking the Bangalore export-garment cluster as a case study, the book explores the conditions that enable but also constrain the capacities of garment workers’ unions to build collective power vis-à-vis employers and thereby improve their conditions. Drawing on theoretical concepts from labour geography, relational economic geography, and Global Production Network (GPN) analysis, the book highlights, on the one hand, how the complex labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster poses manifold challenges and constraints for workers’ and unions’ collective agency. On the other hand, the book illustrates the various networked agency strategies that local garment unions in Bangalore have developed over the years to overcome these constraints by tapping into coalitional power resources from worker, consumer and labour rights organisations in the Global North. This book is therefore highly relevant for economic geographers and other scholars interested in dynamics of labour and development in GPNs as well as for unionists and labour rights activists committed to improving working conditions in the global garment industry. This is an open access book.

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labours describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then use an alternative understanding of pregnancy based on kinship with the second trimester foetal being or baby to resist the erasure of their experience.