The essays in this volume focus on two themes: the centrality of the production of and trade in cloth in the emergence of market activity; and the nature of the industrialization process. The core of the book is formed by four detailed ethnographic studies of the development and current organization of cloth production for the market, in different parts of the world: tailoring in Kano City, northern Nigeria (Pokrant); dyeing and weaving in Daboya, northern Ghana (Goody); 'fashion'- shirt production in Bombay, India (Swallow); and the manufacture of 'handmade' Harris tweed in the Hebrides (Ennew). Each study examines access to raw materials and to the market, relations of production, the investment of capital and the reproduction of the system. Individually, they raise such questions as the role of fashion, the effects of national economic policies and legislation, and factors related to the modification of traditional technologies.

Following the publication of the book by E. R. Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (1960), much additional information was gathered on caste hierarchies in South Asia, and two major attempts were made to identify the underlying unity of this material - a structuralist one by Louis Dumont and a ethnosocialogical one by McKim Marriott et al. This quest for unity seemed attractive, yet at the same time, as the contributions to the present volume indicate, premature. The four papers collected here and published in 1982 are all concerned with caste ideology and caste interaction in different locales of South Asia.