Just about a century ago, the Boston merchants who had helped to build the textile town of Lowell, Mass., into the cradle of the American industrial revolution started pulling out. First, the spindles and looms shifted to the low-wage South. A half-century later, they migrated to the “miracle” economies of East Asia.

In the 1990s, much of the global textile industry relocated yet again, to cities like Dongguan in southern China, the world’s factory floor. Now, as Chinese wages soar, textiles and apparel along with other labor-intensive...