Civilization: The West and the Rest (39 page)

Male civilians also renounced the dandyism of earlier generations. The suit as it had been conceived by Beau Brummell in the Regency era was itself a simplification relative to eighteenth-century fashions. The trend thereafter was inexorably towards bourgeois sobriety. The single-button penguin-like ‘Newmarket’ frock coat, now seen only at pretentious weddings, displaced Brummell’s dress coat and the double-breasted, high-collared coat favoured by Prince Albert. Waistcoats went from colourful Chinese silk to black or grey wool. Breeches yielded to long trousers, and stockings vanished from view, to be replaced by boring black socks. Shirts were uniformly white. Collars seemed to shrink until all that remained were a couple of celluloid chicken wings, wrapped in a necktie that was invariably black. Hats, too, shrank, until only the bowler remained. And hats, too, were black. It was as if a whole society was on its way to a wake.

Of course, there was a great deal more variety and complexity in the female attire of the Victorian period. And there was a different kind of uniformity among the overalled proletariat and the ragged-trousered poor. Nevertheless, the standardization of dress in the Victorian period – which ran the length and breadth of Europe and far beyond the eastern seaboard of the United States – remains a reality and a puzzle, at a time when nationalism was in the ascendant. ‘The Internationale’ existed, it seemed, but only at the level of the bourgeois dress code. The explanation, as might be expected in the industrial age, was mechanical.

The Singer sewing machine was born in 1850, when Isaac Merritt Singer moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and saw what was wrong with the machine they were making in Orson C. Phelps’s workshop. The needle had to be straight not curved. The shuttle needed to be transverse. And the whole thing had to be operated by foot, not by hand. Like Marx, Singer was not a nice man. He had a total of twenty-four children by five different women, one of whom brought an action for bigamy against him, forcing him to flee the United States. Like Marx – and like a disproportionate number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
entrepreneurs, especially in the clothing and cosmetics business
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– Singer was of Jewish origin. And, like Marx, he changed the world – though, unlike Marx, for the better.

I. M. Singer & Company, later the Singer Manufacturing Company, completed the process of mechanizing clothes production that James Hargreaves had begun less than a century before. Now even the sewing together of pieces of cloth could be done by machine. The revolutionary nature of this breakthrough is easily overlooked by a generation that has never sewn on more than a couple of buttons. Singer was evidently a man who loved women; has any man done more for womankind in return? Thanks to Singer, the painstaking hours that had previously been needed to stitch the hem of a skirt became mere minutes – and then seconds. The history of the Singer sewing machine perfectly illustrates the evolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution, as one efficiency gain gave way to another. After the initial breakthrough, there was unceasing mutation: the Turtleback model (1856) was followed by the Grasshopper (1858), the New Family (1865) and the electric 99K (1880). By 1900 there were forty different models in production. By 1929 that had increased to 3,000.

Few nineteenth-century inventions travelled faster. From its New York headquarters at 458 (later 149) Broadway, Singer spread with astonishing speed to become one of the world’s first truly global brands, with manufacturing plants in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Russia and Scotland; at its peak, the Kilbowie factory at Clydebank covered a million square feet and employed 12,000 people. In 1904 global sales passed 1.3 million machines a year. By 1914 that figure had more than doubled. The brand logo – the ‘S’ wrapped around a sewing woman – was ubiquitous, to be seen even (according the firm’s advertising copywriters) on the summit of Mount Everest. In a rare concession to modernity, Mahatma Gandhi acknowledged that it was ‘one of the few useful things ever invented’ – praise indeed from the man who disdained even modern medicine.
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Singer exemplified the American advantage. Not only was the United States still attracting, as it always had, the world’s natural-born risk-takers. Now there were enough of them to constitute a truly unmatched internal market. Between 1870 and 1913 the United States overtook the United Kingdom. In 1820 there had been twice as many people in the UK as in the US. By 1913 it was the other way round. Between 1870 and 1913 the American growth rate was 80 per cent higher.
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Already by 1900 the US accounted for a larger share of world manufacturing output: 24 per cent to Britain’s 18 per cent.
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By 1913 even in per-capita terms the United States was the world’s number-one industrial economy.
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Perhaps more importantly, American productivity was poised to overtake British (though it would not actually do so until the 1920s).
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And, just as in the case of British industrialization, cotton and textiles were front and centre of America’s ‘gilded age’. In the years before the First World War, raw cotton from the South still accounted for 25 per cent of US exports.
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Most American cloth, however, was produced for domestic consumption. Britain’s net exports of cotton goods in 1910 were worth $453 million; those of the United States just $8.5 million. But perhaps the most surprising statistic of all is that the second-largest exporter of cotton goods by that time was a non-Western country – the first member of the Rest to work out how to compete successfully with the West. That country was Japan.
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By 1910 the world had been economically integrated in a way never seen before. The different bonds that linked it together – railways, steamship lines and telegraphs – were almost entirely Western-invented and Western-owned. The West shrank the world. If all the railways of the United States had been laid end to end, the length would have been thirteen times the earth’s circumference. A man could travel from Versailles to Vladivostok by train. And sustained improvements in steamships – the screw propeller, iron hulls, compound engines and surface condensers – made crossing the oceans faster and cheaper than crossing land. The gross tonnage of the
Mau
retania
(1907) was forty-six times that of the
Sirius
(1838) but the horsepower of its engines was 219 times greater, so it was more than three times faster and crossed the Atlantic with a far larger cargo in nine and half days instead of sixteen.
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Ocean freight costs fell by more than a third from 1870 to 1910. It cost 8 shillings to send a ton of cotton goods by rail from Manchester to Liverpool, just 30 miles away, but only 30 shillings to ship the same goods a further 7,250 miles to Bombay. The cost of shipping cloth amounted to less than 1 per cent of the cost of the goods. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) and the Panama Canal (1914) shrank the world still further, the former reducing the distance of the London–Bombay route by more than two-fifths, the latter cutting the cost of shipping from the East to the West Coast of the United States by a third.
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By the late 1860s, thanks to the introduction of gutta-percha coating, undersea cables could be laid and telegrams sent from London to Bombay or to Halifax.
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News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.
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Labour flowed across borders as never before. Between 1840 and 1940, up to 58 million Europeans migrated to the Americas, 51 million Russians to Siberia, Central Asia and Manchuria, and 52 million Indians and Chinese to South-east Asia, Australasia or the Indian Ocean rim.
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Up to 2.5 million migrants from South and East Asia also travelled to the Americas. One in seven of the US population was foreign-born in 1910, a record that has yet to be surpassed.
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Capital, too, flowed around the globe. Britain was the world’s banker, exporting prodigious amounts of capital to the rest of the world; perhaps contemporaries should have praised the English ‘savings glut’ rather than grumbled about imperialism. In the peaks of the overseas investment booms – 1872, 1887 and 1913 – the British current-account surplus exceeded 7 per cent of GDP.
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British firms stood ready to export not just cotton, but the machinery to manufacture cotton and the capital necessary to buy it.

Yet perhaps the most remarkable expression of this first globalization was sartorial. With extraordinary speed, a mode of dressing that was distinctly Western swept the rest of the world, consigning
traditional garb to the dressing-up basket of history. To be sure, that was not the avowed intention of the Singer Manufacturing Company. For the Chicago ‘Great Colombian’ World’s Fair in 1892 – the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World – Singer commissioned a series of thirty-six trade cards called ‘Costumes of the World’ which depicted people of every skin colour, all dressed in traditional costumes, happily using Singer machines. From a Hungarian smock to a Japanese kimono,
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any kind of costume could benefit from a stitch in time under the distinctive metal arm of a Singer. Bosnians and Burmese alike were the beneficiaries of Isaac Merritt’s ingenuity; everyone, in fact, from Algeria to Zululand. Small wonder the Singer became the gift of choice for foreign potentates like the King of Siam, Dom Pedro II of Brazil and the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Yet here is the twist in the tale. Far from using their Singer machines to patch up traditional forms of clothing, the grateful recipients used them for a completely different purpose – namely, to copy and wear Western clothing. The crucial new garments were, for men, the frock coat, the stiff-collared white shirt, the felt hat and the leather boot; and for women, the corset, the petticoat and the ankle-length dress.

In 1921 two royal and imperial heirs – the Crown Prince Hirohito of Japan, the future Shōwa Emperor, and Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII – posed next to one another for a photographer. The thrones they stood to inherit could scarcely have been more geographically distant. Yet here they both were, on the steps of Henry Poole & Co., the Savile Row tailor,
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more or less identically dressed. The Japanese Prince was in London on a pre-wedding shopping spree. A Henry Poole representative had already sailed all the way to Gibraltar to take his measurements, which were then cabled ahead to London. Henry Poole’s ledger for the year in question shows the enormous order placed in Hirohito’s name: military uniforms, embroidered waistcoats, dinner jackets, morning coats. A typical line in the list
reads: ‘A fancy cashmere suit, a blue cloth suit, and a striped flannel suit’.
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Hirohito was far from being the only foreign dignitary in the market for an immaculately tailored English suit. Preserved in Henry Poole’s basement are thousands of suit patterns for clients ranging from the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, to the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Poole’s most devoted customer was Jitendra Narayan, Maharaja of Cooch Behar, whose lifetime purchases of bespoke suits exceeded a thousand. In every case, the aim was the same: to be as well dressed as the perfect English gentleman – and ‘costumes of the world’ be damned. It is revealing that the Japanese word for a suit is
sebiro
: ‘Savile Row’. Even today the smartest suits in Tokyo are English in design, hence the popularity of the Eikokuya brand, which means literally ‘England Store’. Discerning Anglophiles in Ginza, the West End of Tokyo, still seek out Ichibankan, founded by a tailor who learned his craft in Savile Row.

The Japanese revolution in dress dated back to the 1870s. In the name of
bunmei kaika
(‘civilization and enlightenment’) and
fukoku-kyōhei
(‘rich country, strong army’), the imperial elite of the Meiji era had shed their samurai garb and kimonos in favour of replica European suits and dresses. The inspiration for this makeover came from a two-year tour of the United States and Europe by a delegation led by the Meiji minister Iwakura Tomomi, which had to acknowledge that, after centuries of self-imposed isolation, ‘in many respects our civilization is inferior to theirs’.
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Ever since 1853–4, when their economy had been forcibly reopened to trade by the threatening ‘black ships’ of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the Japanese had struggled to work out what it was that made the West so much richer and stronger than the Rest. Touring the West – a practice so common that it inspired a
sugoroku
(board game) – only raised more questions. Was it their political system? Their educational institutions? Their culture? Or the way they dressed? Unsure, the Japanese decided to take no chances. They copied everything. From the Prussian-style constitution of 1889 to the adoption of the British gold standard in 1897, Japan’s institutions were refashioned on Western models. The army drilled like Germans; the navy sailed like Britons. An American-style system of state elementary and middle schools was also introduced. The Japanese even started eating beef, hitherto taboo,
and some reformers went so far as to propose abandoning Japanese in favour of English.