Empire, Industry and Class

The Imperial Nexus of Jute, 1840-1940

Anthony Cox

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135127299
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

Presenting a new approach towards the social history of working classes in the imperial context, this book looks at the formation of working classes in Scotland and Bengal. It analyses the trajectory of labour market formation, labour supervision, cultures of labour and class formation between two regional economies – one in an imperial country and the other in a colonial one.

The book examines the everyday lives of the jute workers of the imperial nexus, and the impact of the 'Dundee School' of Scottish mechanics, engineers and managers who ran the Calcutta jute industry. It goes on to challenge existing theories of imperialism, class formation and class struggle – particularly those that underline the exceptional nature of the Indian experience of industrialization - and demonstrates how and why Empire was able to provide an opportunity to test and perfect ways of controlling the lower classes of Dundee. These historical debates have a continued relevance as we observe the impact of globalization and rapid industrialization in the so-called developing world and the accompanying changes in many areas of the developed world marked by de-industrialization. The book is of use to scholars of imperial history, labour history, British history and South Asian history.

1 The making and re-making of the imperial nexus of jute, 1840–1900

You used to think your ‘Cutty’ small and poor,

See now, how I’ve grown by great Sirmure.

Nigger Sam, Birkie,¹ Victoria, and Champdany,

Have spent upon me many a British penny.

At home we’re all now on the newest plan,

The Electric lights things spick and span.

Thousands of dusky serfs to do our bidding.

Mrs J[uteburgh]. (laughs)

Don’t laugh, you know I am not kidding.

Our servants never strike, least if they do,

For one that goes away, we can get two.

I’ve taken away all your old colonial people,

That used to swear by Dundee and the Old Steeple.

For our Yankee cousins a strong bid will make,

And give your Frisco bag trade a great shake.

(D. H. Nicoll, Ten Years of Conflict and Mrs Juteburgh)²

Although the above excerpt is undated, its title indicates that it was written around 1895–6 at the height of the furious trade struggle between Dundee and Calcutta that laid the basis for the re-making of the imperial nexus of jute. Relations between the two centres had taken a serious turn in 1885, with the creation of the Indian Jute Manufacturers Association (IJMA, shortly therafter renamed the Indian Jute Mills Association) and their adoption of an output control policy that undermined Dundee’s position in the foreign markets for ‘standard’ jute goods. The references to electric lighting and ‘thousands of dusky serfs to do our bidding’ points to the impact of shift-working and the expansion of the Bengal jute industry that took place during the early 1890s, which in turn led to a determined campaign by Dundee’s jute lobby to curb night shift working in Bengal during 1895–6.

The unfolding competitive war between the jute industries of Calcutta and Dundee was waged, on both sides, by Dundonians, as the destiny of the Bengal jute industry was guided by Dundee’s ‘old colonial people’ who had foresworn ‘the Old Steeple’.³ The bitterness widely felt in their home city at this time towards the Dundee School of Calcutta-based managers, supervisors and engi-neers is underlined by the reference to ‘Nigger Sam’, a crude, racist play on the name of the Samnuggur jute mill, established by the Dundonian Thomas Duff, which had spearheaded the move into the US ‘Frisco bag trade’ for burlap.⁴

The impression given by Ten Years of Conflict and Mrs Juteburgh is that the fight was all over bar the shouting. The poem also captures the sense of confi-dence of the Calcutta ‘Cutty’ (the ‘winsome wench’ and nubile witch conjured out of the drink-addled brain of Tam O’ Shanter in Burns’ celebrated poem),⁵ portrayed as an ungrateful daughter glorying in her own mother’s ruin. Indeed, the poem seems to detail an act of slow matricide. But, how far is the poem a true reflection of the changing nature of the relationship between Dundee and Calcutta? Was the humiliation of Dundee as complete as is suggested in the poem, or is there another more complex story to be uncovered from between its lines?

The genesis of jute dependency

Jute and Dundee were made for one another. Manufacture of coarse hemp and linen dated back to the late Middle Ages, but during the eighteenth century Dun-dee’s linen industry underwent a transformation as it benefited from governmentled economic development, which aimed to undermine growing support for Jacobitism and to tie the Scottish junior partner more firmly into the Union with England.⁶ While other areas such as Dunfermline, Leeds and Belfast catered towards the manufacture of finer linen products, Dundee, drawing on its tradition of coarse textile production, thrived on orders for military and naval supplies such as sailcloth, hammocks, sheetings, as well as osnaburg cloth,⁷ destined for the slave plantations of Virginia and the Caribbean. The Napoleonic Wars laid the basis for the emergence of firms such as Baxter Brothers who, encouraged by low-interest loans from a vibrant local banking sector, transformed themselves from modestly sized merchant manufacturers into the future lords of Linenopolis.

Before the widespread growth of the factory system in the nineteenth century, the linen industry was conducted on a domestic basis. In centres such as Dundee and Forfar, spinning and weaving was commonly combined with ordinary crafts, and in the towns and villages on the Fife coast weavers also turned to fishing in times of slack trade. The move towards mechanised spinning led to the wiping out of the Scottish cottage linen industry, and Forfarshire became one of the cockpits of Scottish industrialisation. By the late eighteenth century, there were no less than 23 centres of linen production along the north-east coast of Scotland, with the main development located in and around Dundee.⁸ By 1822, even before machine-spinning had become general, the area was producing no less than 60 per cent of the total Scottish output of linen manufactures.⁹

The Dundee merchants and linen firms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were involved in a trading network stretching from the flax growing areas of the Baltic and the Low Countries to the important cloth markets of North America and the West Indies. With one foot in trade and shaped by a ruthlessly competitive market, the emerging linen lords tenaciously fought any threat, whether real or imagined, to their own narrow interests. In 1823 the Dundee-controlled Forfarshire Chamber of Commerce opposed a reduction of sugar duties on the grounds that ‘the interests of the linen trade of this country are intimately connected with the prosperity of the West Indian planters as your petitioners supply Osnaburghs for the whole of their negroes clothing.’¹⁰ The linen manufacturers were ardent supporters of slavery, which they viewed as integral to their trading relationship with the plantations, and they fought furiously against its abolition. In the event, however, emancipation was not the disaster that many predicted, and sales and profits soon exceeded those during the era of slavery, fuelled by the steady expansion of new markets. The early Scottish linen industry was also reliant on child labour, and the linen lords jealously guarded their right to continue this exploitation, so that while the 1833 Factory Commission led to pioneering legislation aimed at prohibiting the employment of children, Dundee’s linen manufacturers successfully appealed for exemption. ¹¹ The coming of jute would strengthen the close association between Dundee and child labour, and the linen lords’ blinkered attitude towards labour legislation would also become a defining characteristic of the future jute barons.

The expansion of power spinning created a rapidly increasing demand for handloom weavers that was only partially satisfied by increasing migration from Dundee’s hinterland of Angus, Fife and Highland Perthshire, and the town’s metamorphosis into Juteopolis would only be assured with the opening up of migratory links with Ulster. The Irish were a familiar sight in and around Dundee during the late eighteenth century, comprising handloom weavers, flax dressers and seasonal harvest workers, but during the 1830s they started arriving in larger numbers, prompted by adverts in the Irish press promising good wages and the availability of cheap steamship travel, which made the short sea passage to Scotland easier following its introduction in the late 1820s. Thereafter emigration to Dundee by single women and family groups, with men seeking work in heckling and weaving and women and children in the spinning mills, increasingly fed on itself as immigrants wrote back to their families with news of job opportunities and wages in excess of those available in southern Ulster.

Like Scotland, Ulster had witnessed a phenomenal growth in linen manufac-turing during the eighteenth century, which guaranteed rising living standards for many labourers, cottiers and small farmers who took up handloom weaving, while hand spinning also provided an important supplement to family income and a vital source of support for poor single women. By the 1830s, however, Ulster’s domestic linen industry, like many of the traditional textile areas of India during the same period, was in a state of near collapse due to the mass production of cheap Lancashire cottons, which also depressed the price for competing linen goods, while the rise of Belfast as a major centre of power-driven wet spinning thoroughly undermined hand spinning as a paying occupation.¹² It was during these turbulent times that Thomas Beggs, an Ulster weaver-poet, wrote that ‘the guid auld times are gane out o’ sight/An’ it mak’s the saut tear start to mine e’e/For lords o’ the Mill and Machine hae’ decreed/That bodies like me maun beg their bread’.¹³ The advent of the Irish Famine during the 1840s turned Irish emigration from a stream into a tide. By 1851, approximately 50 per cent of the labour force of the Dundee linen industry was Irish born.¹⁴ Ten years later it was estimated that the proportion of Irish in Dundee and Glasgow was almost identical, at around 15 per cent of their respective populations, with the majority comprising women. By 1871, nearly two-thirds of first generation Irish immigrants in Dundee were female, a much larger proportion than in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen.¹⁵

Female participation in the emerging jute industry was greater than any other British textile industry as a result of the systematic removal of male labour from weaving and heckling during the 1840s and 1850s, a process amounting to a social as well as an industrial revolution. In Lancashire, by contrast, many male artisan workers retained their position, and their wider social status, following mechanisation, thus paving the way for the emergence of a large male labour aristocracy within the cotton industry.¹⁶ In sharp contrast, the male labour aristocracy in the Dundee jute industry was drawn from a much narrower layer of skilled engineers, foremen and tenters, which, as we shall see, would have major consequences for the subsequent socio-economic development of the town.

Although anti- Catholic and anti- Irish riots occurred in the 1830s, the succeeding decades were marked by a remarkable lack of sectarianism in Dundee, despite the continuation of large-scale Irish immigration. According to William Walker, this was due to the fact that the vast majority of incomers were young females, while Dundee, unlike the west of Scotland, did not experience high levels of Protestant Irish immigration.¹⁷ However, anti- Irish feeling was also limited through the ability of the burgeoning Irish population, along with native Scottish Chartists, to forcibly prevent the establishment of the Orange Order in the town. In July 1841, an attempt by the Orange Order to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne was stymied when a vast mob assembled to prevent the march from taking place. The marchers had to be protected by local police, and by Catholic clergymen who, unsuccessfully, called upon the ‘infuriated mob’ to refrain from violence.¹⁸ This represented a major setback in the attempt to establish the Orange Order north of the Tay, and while the organisation did grow in Dundee during the 1870s, religious sectarianism remained a minor cause for concern, which markedly differed from the situation in Glasgow and Lanarkshire where sectarian tensions escalated during the later nineteenth century.

The coming of jute

The East India Company (EIC) were using and trading jute rope, gunnies¹⁹ and canvas throughout India as early as the 1740s, but the wider commercial possibilities of the fibre were not seriously appreciated until the end of the eighteenth century, when the possessions of the burgeoning British Empire were being systematically scoured for raw materials that could be turned to commercial account. In 1792, the EIC directors ordered enquiries to be made in Bengal regarding hemp substitutes and in 1803 experimental farms were established and a scientific officer, a Dr Roxburgh, was appointed to take charge of them.²⁰ Consignments of farmed jute were sent to Kew Gardens in London and then distributed to British textile centres, but early attempts to raise interest amongst manufacturers failed due to the coarse nature and appearance of the ‘disreputable fibre’.²¹ In 1822, however, parcels of jute made their way to Dundee and, following a decade of experiments, the fibre wa...