Transparent Capital: Indian Textiles, Global Standards, and the Ethiopian State

• In Event: 3442 - South-South Flows in Global Context

Abstract

From 2015 onward, there have been huge investments in textile and garment manufacturing in Ethiopia by Chinese, Indian and Turkish entrepreneurs. While the Ethiopian state attracted investment by providing low-cost labor, electricity, and indigenously grown cotton, it strictly controlled these investors’ conduct through a series of policies and regulations. My ethnographic research in an Indian textile factory near Addis Ababa in October-November, 2018, finds the Indian management to be transparent in its factory practices; it pursued clean technology and workplace accreditation from global agencies, and formulated a collective agreement with the workers’ union. Transparency appeared to be necessary to do business in Ethiopia, not an option. I argue that the source of this transparency was not the Ethiopian developmental state, but the standards on textile production put in place by developmental and consumer organizations in the US and Europe. Besides, the Ethiopian state itself was heavily reliant on US developmental aid and concessions that demanded abiding by human rights standards. I suggest that understanding Asian engagements in Africa is incomplete without recognizing their embeddedness in hegemonic neoliberal world institutions.

Author

• Manjusha S. Nair, George Mason University