Chapter 2 lays the ground for an understanding of what was involved in the transformation of tailoring, identifying key developments in technology, tools and materials. Pre-industrial sewing techniques and tools show much shared terrain between China and Europe. Items such as scissors, needles and measuring rules were essentially similar. Under the impact of cultural and technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even these tools were gradually displaced and a range of entirely new items entered the realm of tailoring. Buttons, safety pins, belt hooks and tape measures flowed into the Treaty Ports from suppliers in Germany, Britain and Japan, stimulating new local industries in China. The changed contents of a sewing basket point in the first half of the twentieth century to a large-scale reconfiguration of clothing production under way in these years, ahead of the visible transformation of dress in the Mao years.

Marked military buttons were a distinct innovation introduced in the wake of the global Seven Years’ War that spread across the Atlantic world. On the smallest scale they physically embodied the reforms that characterize the period following that conflict. When considered at all, they are often used definitively by archaeologists to determine the presence of certain soldiers at specific sites. Although designed to function in this way, military buttons could not definitively identify personnel, given the realities of early modern military institutions, economic systems, and increasingly long distance imperial wars. As such, marked military buttons represent ideals of order and control rather than their actuality, exposing what military regulations and mandates alone obscure. This chapter explores the intention and reality of marked military buttons in the armies of France, Great Britain, and the new United States from the 1760s to the 1780s. These tiny artifacts reveal attempts to manifest systems of organization that, in fact, disclose their limitations to enact such systems, and thereby complicate their status as diagnostic artifacts in archaeological contexts.