Even the humblest item of clothing can be imbued with critical meanings. This is the case with the Chinese coolie hat, headwear linked to the mass migration of indentured labour, populations whose toil shaped colonial societies and cultures globally. Central to this chapter is understanding how indentured labourers’ clothing – the clothing of servitude – was created and disseminated beyond borders, how it interacted with production and consumption, and what agency and impact it had. This chapter is also an endeavour to see how the very essence of forced and bonded labour – the forcefulness and social segregation – interplayed with clothing.

On the urban streets of Cairo, Tokyo, or Mombasa, around 1900–1930s, clothing in multiple styles coexisted, including varied ‘European styles’, differently categorized in each location as part of local fashion culture: under full- or half-body covering veils, women in Cairo wore European-style dresses; next to groups of women in colourful kanga wrappers in Mombasa or meisen kimono in Tokyo, groups of working men wore uniform-like ‘Western’ business attire or simplified short-sleeved shirts and half-trousers.

Until recently, the adoption and diffusion of European-style clothing has been mainly discussed by region or group, mostly within the framework of national history.