Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The British anti-slavery sugar boycotts - In the 1790s, a popular British movement urged ordinary households to refuse sugar produced by enslaved labour in the British Caribbean. The campaign was largely organised by women at household and parish level, used pamphlets, shop boycotts, and lists of grocers who sold only free-grown sugar, and drew an estimated three hundred thousand households into a “free produce” practice at its peak. - Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), an English Quaker abolitionist from Leicester, published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, criticising William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson for accepting a gradualist position on the abolition of West Indian slavery. She organised a local boycott of slave-grown sugar so effective that within a year roughly a quarter of Leicester’s population had stopped buying sugar. The pamphlet spread among women’s anti-slavery societies in Britain and influenced American abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott. More than seventy women’s anti-slavery associations were active in Britain by the late 1820s. American consumer activism: leagues, labels, fair trade, anti-sweatshop - The National Consumers League, founded in New York in 1899, with Florence Kelley as long-serving general secretary, ran white-label and union-label campaigns for clothing and other goods produced under fair conditions, and campaigned for the abolition of child labour and for shorter working hours. - The fair-trade movement developed from the 1940s through the 1960s, with organisations such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV importing handicrafts on fair terms from producers in lower-income countries. Fairtrade certification was established in 1988. - The student-led anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s and 2000s, including United Students Against Sweatshops, targeted university apparel licensing and major fashion brands, and pushed for codes of conduct, factory monitoring, and the right of garment workers to organise.Black American consumer politics - The Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns of the 1930s, beginning in Harlem and spreading across Northern cities, organised boycotts of white-owned stores that refused to hire Black staff. - The Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 to December 1956, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, was sustained for more than a year by Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to use segregated buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., ran an alternative carpool network during the boycott. - Operation Breadbasket, founded in Atlanta in 1962 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later run by Jesse Jackson from a Chicago base from 1966, used selective patronage and threatened boycotts to win jobs and supplier contracts for Black workers and businesses from white-owned firms operating in Black neighbourhoods.The consumer cooperative movement - On 21 December 1844, in Toad Lane in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, twenty-eight weavers and craftsmen opened a small shop they owned together. The principles they wrote down, known as the Rochdale Principles, included democratic member control on the basis of one member one vote, open membership, distribution of surplus to members in proportion to purchases, political and religious neutrality, and the education of members. The model spread quickly across Britain and the world and became the constitutional basis of the modern consumer and worker cooperative movements. - The Mondragon Corporation was founded in 1956 in the Basque country of northern Spain by Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta and a small group of graduates from a local technical school. From a single workshop it has grown into one of the largest worker-owned cooperative networks in the world, with operations across industrial manufacturing, retail (the Eroski supermarket chain), finance (the Caja Laboral cooperative bank), and higher education (Mondragon University), employing tens of thousands of worker-owners. Australia and global garment supply chains - The Australian labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built consumer cooperatives and union-label campaigns, including the Co-operative Bookshop tradition and Rochdale-style retail cooperatives in working-class suburbs. - Australian fair-trade and ethical-consumption institutions grew from the 1970s onwards, including the Oxfam Australia fair-trade shops and the Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand certification body. - Contemporary global garment supply chains depend heavily on the labour of migrant women in countries with low wages and weak protection of labour rights. A series of catastrophic factory deaths in the global garment industry in the 2010s, including factory fires and a major building collapse, focused international attention on conditions and prompted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the wider transparency movement now visible in Australian ethical-fashion brand campaigns. REFERENCES [1] Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016). [2] Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). [3] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). [4] Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). [5] Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824). [6] Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). [7] Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998). [8] Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). [9] William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1988). [10] Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stake-Holder Society (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1999). [11] Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000). FURTHER READING W. E. B. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans (1907). The earliest scholarly study of mutual-aid and cooperative economic life in Black American communities. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Includes the “moral economy” thread that informs how historians read the early consumer-political tradition and the relationship between custom, refusal, and the market. Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997). Essays on the 1990s anti-sweatshop campaigns and the politics of the global garment supply chain. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986). Connects feminist political economy to the global production of consumer goods. April Linton, Fair Trade from the Ground Up: New Markets for Social Justice (2012). On the development and contradictions of the fair-trade movement from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave, A Global History of Co-operative Business (2018). A wide-ranging history including the Australian cooperative tradition alongside European and American developments. Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997). Glickman’s earlier book, on how the living wage became central to American labour politics and how consumer identity entered working-class political thought. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com
