Jason Petrulis, The Education University of Hong Kong

From Temple Tonsure to Woman's Wig: Making Indian hair markets in the Cold War

Jason Petrulis, Assistant Professor of US and Global History, The Education University of Hong Kong

This paper examines Cold War globalization, using the human-hair wig to understand how global markets were constructed and connected. It pivots around a 1965 US embargo on communist Chinese hair, which aimed to articulate a “free world” empire but unintentionally made markets for non-aligned Indian hair and wigs. We track Indian tresses as they reconstructed globalizing markets – traveling from temples, where worshippers donated hair, transforming body into gift into cash; to courtrooms, where barbers’ tussles over tonsure rights remade labor and property markets; to factories and salons, where wig-workers and -wearers fashioned new meanings for the global markets that entangled them.

Commentator: Zhaojin Zeng, Texas A&M University San Antonio

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About the History of Capitalism Seminar Series

This seminar is a forum for works-in-progress in the history of capitalism, broadly defined. We seek proposals from scholars at all levels. These proposals may consider a variety of subjects, including the history of race and racism, gender and feminist studies, intellectual history, political history, legal history, business history, the history of finance, labor history, cultural history, urban history, and agricultural history.

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