Search Results

This chapter discusses the competition between the jute industries of Dundee and Calcutta, India. Dundee's expertise in jute spinning and weaving helped start the Calcutta industry in the 1850s and continued to shape it throughout the next one hundred years. But by 1900 the Calcutta industry dwarfed its Dundee counterpart. In 1911, the peak year for employment in the Dundee jute mills, the total labour force reached 37,000 workers. When Calcutta achieved its peak in 1928 there were 339,000 workers, almost twice as numerous as the entire population of Dundee. During a parliamentary debate on the jute industry in 1936, Florence Horsbrugh, the Conservative MP for Dundee at the time, spoke in apocalyptic terms of ‘a new terror’ for Dundee workers as imports from India surged 125 per cent higher than they had been in 1935.

This chapter examines the impact of globalisation and empire upon industrial Britain by focusing on the case of the Scottish city of Dundee as Juteopolis. Economic historians have suggested that falling transport costs combined with reductions in trade barriers triggered a rise in trade volumes in the nineteenth century. These processes have been most intensively studied for trade across the North Atlantic, where the expansion of the grain traded from North America into European markets epitomised much of what was happening. The expansion of trade in the North Atlantic was closely associated with two other key features of contemporary globalisation: the multiplication of international capital flows and migration. Within this fast-expanding multilateral trading system, India became a linchpin in the run-up to World War I by being a major global supplier of raw materials and foodstuffs. Meanwhile, Dundee was at the centre of the process of imperial globalisation, with its jute industry contributing on a large scale to the British outflows of capital and migrants. This chapter considers the competition between Calcutta and Dundee in the area of jute production.

This chapter examines the response of employers in Dundee's jute industry to the competition between India and the Scottish city, dubbed Juteopolis, in the area of jute production during the British imperial period. Dundee's connections with India were multiple and complex, but after the 1870s they were increasingly shaped by the problem of competition from Calcutta in markets for jute goods, competition which came to be seen to threaten the prosperity, and in some views the very survival, of the city's main industry. This chapter considers how Indian competition was understood in Dundee, and how these understandings helped shape the employers' responses. It also discusses the raw jute issue in relation to protectionism and empire, with particular emphasis on the export tax assessed on Bengal's raw jute and its remittance for exports to Britain. Finally, it analyses Dundee employers' views of the conditions of labour in Calcutta and the relevance of the Indian Factory Acts to the issue of competition between the two cities.

This chapter examines the rise of Dundee as Juteopolis under the British Empire, with particular emphasis on how jute dominated the Scottish city's economy and the physical character, especially in the years up to World War II. Jute's extraordinary dominance in Dundee is reflected in employment patterns; in 1911, 40 per cent of the workforce were directly employed in the jute industry. Yet this 40-per cent figure, itself striking, significantly underestimates the role of jute in the city's economy. Dundee's political culture during the period was also fundamentally shaped by its status as Juteopolis. The chapter considers how this complex relationship between Dundee's economic life and politics developed from the mid-Victorian heyday to the disastrous years of the 1930s. It also discusses the prevalence of women in Dundee's jute industry, along with persistence of low wages, poverty, and overcrowded housing and high mortality in the city.

This chapter examines the economic impact of World War I on the Scottish city of Dundee, dubbed Juteopolis, and India, its main competitor in the area of jute production. The war marked the beginnings of a period of chronic depression in Dundee, largely as the consequence of the growth of competition from Calcutta, even as it encouraged the long-run expansion of the jute industry in continental Europe and strengthened the protectionism of Dundee's jute employers. The chapter also considers the Left's response to notions of imperial protectionism in the postwar period, which saw the jute unions becoming, at least initially, more powerful, and the Labour Party dominating Dundee's parliamentary politics. Finally, it places the dilemmas posed for Dundee by Calcutta's competition in the context of the national debate about how those on the Left should respond to the need to sustain employment in Britain's staple industries, without advocating a simple protectionist strategy against low-wage competition.

This chapter examines the response of workers in Dundee's jute industry to the competition between India and the Scottish city, dubbed Juteopolis, in the area of jute production during the British imperial period. In the nineteenth century, Dundee's population was overwhelmingly dominated by the industrial working class. In analysing Dundee workers' responses, the chapter uses Mike Savage's threefold division of responses to insecurity as a framing device: ‘mutualist’, which seek to reduce the degree of reliance on wage labour; ‘economistic’, which seek to ensure job security; and ‘statist’, which seek to get the state to ensure measures of security. It also considers the impact of gender on workers' responses; Dundee's jute industry was exceptional in its level of employment of women, including married women. More specifically, it assesses the extent to which gender shaped the world of Victorian and Edwardian working-class Dundee, including the implications, if any, for how empire was responded to.

This chapter examines various responses to the crisis in the Dundee jute industry during the 1930s, a crisis that stemmed from the competition posed by India. None of the main political parties offered a plausible solution to the crisis. The National government, despite being in favor of protectionism, drew the line at any statutory restriction on imports from India. The Conservatives were divided on how this aim was best achieved, whereas the Labour Party's equivocation about the benefits of free trade was significantly increased by the crisis after 1929. However, the triumph of a protectionist Conservative Party in 1931 acted to revive and reinforce Labour's traditional ideological opposition to tariffs. In Dundee, the crisis underpinned two distinct alignments of forces. One was a local version of a Labour Party/Communist Party alliance; the other was a purely local, ‘united front’ which brought together a protectionist alliance between the local jute employers and jute trade unions, along with the city council and the local MPs. The crucial underpinning for both these developments was the depth of the unemployment crisis of the 1930s in Dundee.

This chapter explores the complex, intertwined Conservative politics of protectionism and empire in the Scottish city of Dundee, dubbed Juteopolis, during the 1930s. In the anti-Labour landslide of 1931, Dundee elected its first Conservative MP since the Great Reform Act, Florence Horsbrugh. Re-elected in 1935, for the whole of the decade Horsbrugh was faced with responding to the desperate economic plight of Juteopolis as it suffered from the collapse of international trade, but most of all the competition from India's jute industry. In the face of the shrinkage in markets for its products, Dundee suffered from the worst unemployment rate of any major city in Britain in the 1930s. In the early 1930s both the question of the British Empire's economic policy and the question of India were central to political debate in the Conservative Party. This chapter considers the Conservatives' failure to protect Juteopolis from Calcutta competition; Indian competition, based on low wages and hence low overall costs, was rapidly successful in out-competing the British goods.

This concluding chapter examines how imperial politics shaped the battle between India and the Scottish city of Dundee over jute after World War II. In 1948 the Labour government's Working Party on the industry advocated modernisation of the jute industry to be combined with ‘protection against low-priced Indian imports’. For postwar Dundee, the new social settlement brought about by the war meant two major policy shifts. First, Jute Control — which allowed Indian goods to be sold in Britain only at prices with which Dundee could compete — was kept in place for employment reasons. Secondly, regional unemployment was addressed seriously for the first time by substantial subsidies to investors in areas deemed vulnerable to job shortages. In the ten years after 1945 Dundee's jute industry enjoyed an unexpected degree of prosperity, with output and employment trending upwards until the late 1950s. After the mid-1950s the fate of the industry depended more on changing patterns of demand than directly on import controls.

This book explores the relation between empire and popular culture by focusing on the British Empire's material consequences. Using the case of the Scottish city of Dundee, it analyses the interwoven issues of empire and globalisation from the ‘expansionary’ period before 1914 and the era from World War I to World War II. Dundee is especially well-suited for this purpose given both the strength of its imperial connections — especially with India — and the intensity of its globalisation. Dundee's connections with India arose primarily from its role as ‘Juteopolis’: from the 1850s the city's jute industry expanded rapidly, with Bengal as the supplier of raw materials. The book puts Dundee's relationship with empire in the context of national and international developments as well as debates that shaped that relationship. In particular, it examines the ways in which imperial issues became woven into the debates in the city about how to respond to Calcutta's rise as a competitor, along with the response of Dundee's working class to the insecurities brought about by competition.