I am not an expert on this side of the business but I have seen some very innovative technology and I would expect that the online market place will continue to evolve to replace face-to face activities. When I was last in China I met with the founders of a company called Sourcego that had a very impressive platform for B2B in textile in apparel. Certainly we have seen this evolution in the market for raw cotton here in the US, where international trade increasingly takes place through internet platforms such as The Seam.com.

The book was actually born at a student protest at Georgetown University in Washington DC, when protesters were demanding to know where our logo T-shirts came from, and also demanding that the University be accountable for the working conditions in the factories that made apparel with the Georgetown logo on it. As I thought about it, I became convinced that this very simple, small thing - the $5.00 T-shirt - had an important story to tell about globalization. And that much of the story was directly related to much of the news of the day. My t-shirt was of course made of cotton, and so the issue of cotton subsidies, and, more broadly, how US farmers maintain their competitiveness, was an important part of the story. How-and where-the cotton ultimately became a t-shirt relates to all of the "sweatshop" protests we have seen, and also to the role of the textiles and apparel industries in economic development. The T-shirt's journey back to the US from China is really a story about the world trading rules, which are of course evolving all of the time. And the end of the T-shirt's story-when it finds its way to Africa-highlights perhaps the most vexing issue in the globalization discussion, which is the gap between rich and poor. So the T-shirt's story really allowed me to examine some of the most timely and critical issues in the globalization discourse.

I wrote this book through very turbulent times, through 9/11, and through US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and through much drama on the world political scene. My most enduring impression, however, is how well everyone gets along on a personal level. The writing of the book took me to the US, to China, and to Africa, to speak with whites, blacks, Asians, Jews, Muslims. Usually one person in my t-shirts' story would introduce me to the next, and all of these people from remarkably different backgrounds got along so well because they were tied together through trade and through the global economy. As I write at the end of the book, when I was finished I had a chain of friends that stretched all of the way around the world, a chain of friends that were connected to one another through my t-shirt.

After researching the elements of my T-shirts life story, I think it is clear that neither globalization's champions nor its protestors have it quite right. This debate has centered on the virtues vs. the perils of competitive economic markets, especially the effects on the poor. One side claims that markets and trade will ultimately lift the poor, while the other side fears that markets and trade will impoverish them further.

My book, I think, shows that the argument over markets is the wrong argument. Markets are embedded in rules and social structures, and who writes the rules and how they are written, that is, politics, is much more important than markets in understanding the life of my T-shirt. It is politics, not markets, that determines who wins and loses.

If I were an activist trying to advance the welfare of the poor, my focus would be on including the poor in politics and enhancing their political voice, rather than on shielding them from the effects of economic markets. I have learned that is better to include people in politics rather than protect them from markets.

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