Book review, to be published in: Internationales Asienforum, München.

Jörg Zimmermann: Kleinproduktion in Pakistan. Die exportorientierte Sportartikelindustrie in Sialkot/Pakistan. Abhandlungen   Anthropogeographie. Institut für Geographische Wissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, Band 57. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. 1997. xv, 331 pp., 12 maps, 123 tables, 16 photographs, DM 62.00, ISBN 3-496-02625-1.

The author, a geographer from Berlin's Free University, has studied Pakistan's small scale industry, especially the export oriented sports articles industry in the Sialkot District of Pakistan's Punjab Province. Sialkot was one of the few industrial towns that Pakistan inherited when the British divided India as well as the Punjab before leaving the subcontinent in 1947. Until then, the areas which became West Pakistan (Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, seceded in 1971) had served as agricultural hinterland of British India. Sialkot was known for its sports goods and chirurgical instruments. Most of the entrepreneurs were Hindus and Sikhs; they fled or were driven out of Pakistan during the turmoil that accompanied Partition. Soon relations deteriorated between the two new dominions India and Pakistan; Sialkot literally became cornered in the North East of Pakistan's Punjab Province, close to a border, that stretched from the Karakorums to the Arabian Sea with just one check point near Lahore, which only few Pakistanis and Indians were allowed to cross. The Muslim merchant communities, mostly from Bombay, moved to Karachi where they set up various industrial enterprises; in Punjab Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) became the centre of the upcoming textiles industry. Sialkot, however, could not attract any considerable number of entrepreneurs and never regained its position as a major industrial centre. But Sialkot still had its skills, since the workers mainly had been Muslims, and over the decades the manufacturing industry could make up some of the losses, especially in sports goods whereas surgical instruments no longer play a prominent role in Pakistan's manufacturing industry.

The sports goods industry had started already in the 19th century with orders mainly from the Army. Initially hockey sticks and tennis rackets dominated production, footballs gained importance later. They are still manufactured literally, i.e. made by hand; the sowing is done mainly in small workshops and only the final stages of production are done in factories, which today mostly work for foreign firms.

The first decades of Pakistan saw a steady decline of Sialkot's importance as an industrial centre; during the 1950s and 1960s textile mills, producing yarn and cloth, sprung up elsewhere; when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came into power after the Bangladesh War, he shifted the emphasis to heavy industry like the steel plant in Karachi and the Heavy Foundry in Taxila. During the 1970s and 1980s the potential of light, consumer goods industry was finally discovered and a series of small industrial towns in North East Punjab developed. Much was also expected from the informal (how ever defined) sector. As Zimmermann reports, out of 365 projects sanctioned in six industrial parks until 1985, however, only four had started production (p. 116).

What is remarkable for the sport articles industry, especially for the manufacturing of footballs, which are in the focus of interest in the study, is, that it bears elements of the formal as well of the informal sector, that most of the production is export-oriented and has to meet the high quality standards of the international market, still, much of the work is being done under most primitive conditions, by unskilled, even child, labourers, in primitive shacks in small villages outside the city, which is the hub for this industry, although itself is no longer of any remarkable centrality, even not under the conditions of a rural based third world country. The division of labour and the relations within Sialkot's sports articles industry are described in a very detailed manner; as well as the effects of globalization on some remote rural hinterland is demonstrated. That footballs have been produced quite often with the help of children, found world wide media attention in connection with the last world championship. Zimmermann dedicates a sub-chapter to this social impact of the division of labour (pp. 278 sqq.): He quotes a number of sources, which   using different concepts   give the number of child labourers in Pakistan in the mid 1990s as 2.5 million to 16.5 million and 7 per cent to 40 per cent of the total number of workers. According to his own survey, of those sewing the footballs, more then often working in bondage, only 10 per cent are over 30 years old and only 47 per cent are adults; more than every third are under 15 years old, and every tenth even under ten years old (pp. 283 sqq.). One should, however, not forget, that the largest number of child labourers work in agriculture. Surprisingly, the young workers not necessarily earn less than the grown ups (p. 291), once they have gained the necessary skills, although the skills argument often is overemphasized, when it comes to finding excuses for child labour. In three quarters and more of the cases it is the economic pressure which forces the families to let their children work as football sewers.

The book is well documented with many maps, charts and pictures. The sports articles industry no longer is one of the main industrial activities in Pakistan nor is it a major foreign exchange earner. But one can see how an industry changed over more than a century. Sialkot's declining importance is, of course, a result of Partition and geography, although the main development axis of the country, i.e. the Grand Trunk Road  from Lahore to Rawalpindi/Islamabad and onwards to he Khyber, is close by. Only the sports articles production is still of some importance, the government has done little to increase Sialkot's attractiveness for new industries,

The book should be of interest not only for those interested in Pakistan's regional geography or small industry; it also sets a fine example of a careful and informative analysis of a selected industry within a regional pattern. Unfortunately, there is no translation available neither of the book nor of any parts of it; there is only a short English summary on pages xiv and xv. The author, thus, should be encouraged, to make the results of his work available to those researched on and to the decision makers in Pakistan, as the complaint more than often has been in Pakistan, that the country only can benefit from the academic exercises of foreign researchers, if their findings become accessible in one of the major languages of the country, i.e. English or Urdu.