The Travel of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy
Chapter One
Reinsch Cotton Farm,
Smyer, Texas
Unlike French wine or Florida oranges, Texas cotton doesn't brag
about where it was born and raised. Desolate, hardscrabble,
and alternately baked to death, shredded by windstorms, or
pummeled by rocky hail, West Texas will never have much of
a tourist trade. Flying into the cotton country near Lubbock on a clear fall
day, I had a view of almost lunar nothingness: no hills, no trees. No grass,
no cars. No people, no houses. The huge and flat emptiness is jarring and
intimidating at first, since one can't help but feel small and exposed in this
landscape. Though I have traveled to dozens of countries and to almost
every continent, Lubbock, Texas, was one of the most foreign places I had
ever been. There is a very good chance that my T-shirt-and yours-was
born near Lubbock, the self-proclaimed "cottonest city" in the world.
The people of this forbidding yet harshly beautiful place are well
suited to the landscape. Indeed, they are the product of it. The land has
humbled them with its unpredictable temperament and its sheer scale, yet
made them proud of each small success in taming and coaxing from it the ... read full excerpt from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade ebook
