In Nepal, as elsewhere, the past influences the present, and individual actions are rooted in collective trajectories. Drawing on interviews and archival materials, this chapter situates the Nepali readymade garment industry within a span of economic history stretching from Nepal's pre-Unification (or Conquest)1 era to its interface with the British colonizers, as well as postcolonial South Asia. The historical reconstruction of the changing relations of industrial production and cultural practices in Nepal allows me to demonstrate how the decline of the Nepali garment industry is not an isolated crisis but rather a failure of development, situated within the country's transition from a mono-ethnic Hindu neoliberal state to a federal republic with alternative aspirations for prosperity.

The story of the Nepali garment industry also needs to be situated within the global industrial landscape. In being both export-oriented and import-driven, garment manufacturing is inextricably woven into the international politics of trade, and its apparati such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). The negotiated trajectory taken by the Nepali garment industry within this global institutional set up is a deeply localized one, and needs to be differentiated from its global and regional counterparts, even if it shares with some of them a common point of origin of an American Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) for international trade. This chapter will tell the story of the ‘Nepalization’ of the garment industry in terms of who populated it and what kinds of imaginations fuelled its designs while it lasted (Shakya, 2004).

Nepal

Having been, for long, a relatively isolated Himalayan kingdom, Nepal has undergone radical economic expansions more than once in its recent history. From the mid-seventeenth century up until the beginning of the twentieth century, the ancient kingdom of Nepal in Kathmandu Valley functioned primarily as a gateway to Tibet. The Buddhist Newar traders enjoyed the privilege of unlimited residential rights as well as a monopoly over minting Tibetan coins, secured through a treaty brokered in 1650 which built on earlier exchanges, including a marriage alliance between Kathmandu's princess Bhrikuti and the Tibetan emperor Songtsan Gampo in the seventh century (Slusser, 1982; Rankin, 2004).