If the phone disperses across chokepoints and the battery funnels through one country, the cotton tee does a third thing entirely: it relays. Each step is handed to whichever country does it cheapest, so a plain shirt can cross four borders before you wear it — grown in one place, spun and woven in another, sewn in a third, sold in a fourth.
A plain cotton T-shirt is the opposite of a phone or a battery. Those converge on chokepoints; the tee runs a relay, with each stage handed to whoever does it cheapest — so a single shirt can cross four borders before it reaches you. The classic illustration, traced in Pietra Rivoli's The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: cotton grown in Texas, spun and woven in China, sewn in Bangladesh, and sold back in an American or European shop. A five-dollar shirt that has been around the world.
It begins as fibre. Cotton is grown across the United States — the world's largest exporter — along with India (about a quarter of the global crop), China (mostly in Xinjiang), Brazil and West Africa. The boll is ginned, baled and shipped to wherever it will be spun. One wrinkle that has reshaped the map: much of China's cotton comes from Xinjiang, and US and EU forced-labour import bans have scrambled who is willing to buy it. Around 2,700 litres of water go into a single tee before it is even a thread.
China spins the yarn, knits and weaves the fabric, and dyes and finishes it at a scale and speed no one else matches — towns like Shaoxing's Keqiao run the largest fabric markets on Earth. China is the world's #1 clothing exporter, around a third of global trade, and it owns the upstream. But its wages have risen, and the most labour-heavy step has moved next door.
Cut-Make-Trim — the sewing — is the most labour-intensive, lowest-margin step, so it migrates to the cheapest hands. Bangladesh is the world's #2 clothing exporter, with around four million garment workers (roughly four in five of them women) and a minimum wage near $113 a month; Vietnam, Cambodia, Türkiye and, increasingly, parts of Africa take the rest. Bangladesh grows almost no cotton and imports nearly all its fabric, mostly from China and India: it is, almost purely, the place the world's clothes are sewn. The human cost is real — the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse killed more than 1,100 workers and forced a rewrite of factory-safety rules.
The finished garments sail to the brands and shoppers of Europe and the United States — Zara, H&M, Uniqlo, Shein and the rest — often the very countries where the cotton was grown. Why the shape matters: unlike the battery's single chokepoint, apparel has no hub. It is a distributed relay that chases low wages, which is why the sewing keeps hopping — China to Bangladesh to Vietnam, and perhaps next to Africa — and why a tariff or a labour ban lands very differently here than on a chip. Set against the phone and the battery, the tee is the atlas's third shape: one disperses, one funnels, and this one relays.