Ahead of delivering two lectures on Dundee’s jute connections, Professor Gordon Stewart speaks to the Courier about the city’s historic industry.
Open the pages of almost any newspaper on a regular basis and you’ll find stories bemoaning foreign countries for spiriting away our jobs with low-wage workers and attractive tax regimes.
Whether it’s manufacturing jobs going to China, IT posts going to India or, to cite a local case in the not-too-distant past, NCR’s ATM manufacturing outfit moving to Hungary, there are plenty of opportunities to accuse Johnny Foreigner of swooping in and taking our industry.
Of course, it’s somewhat hubristic for the wealthy countries that invented capitalism and the free market economy to carp when it doesn’t work in their favour.
So it’s hard to know whether to be reassured or appalled that the situation was much the same 100 years ago.
“One of the interesting things about jute is that it was one of the earliest signs of the tensions we now see with globalisation,” says Professor Gordon Stewart.
“It was Dundee that introduced jute to Calcutta and effectively set up the jute industry over there. Very soon, Calcutta was manufacturing jute more cheaply and more efficiently than Dundee was, and people began to complain about it.”
An expert on the jute links between Dundee and Calcutta, Gordon is currently on secondment at Dundee University as the Leverhulme Professor. He’s fascinated by the city’s history of jute manufacture.’Global city'”Jute made Dundee a global city,” he says. “America used jute to wrap its massive cotton crops. It was used across Europe and Asia. Scott took it to the Antarctic on the Discovery.
“There wasn’t a corner of the world that was untouched by jute.”
For the Dundee born academic, the four-month secondment is a welcome chance to rediscover the city he grew up in. The 66-year old went to Morgan Academy before studying modern history at St Andrews University, graduating in 1967.
He then headed to Canada, where he took a PhD at Queen’s University in Ontario. In 1970, he went to work at Michigan State University where he has spent most of his subsequent career.
His list of publications is as long as your arm and deals mainly with British imperial and world history. In 1998 he wrote Jute & Empire, which looked at how the Calcutta jute industry defeated Dundee’s.
Much of the research for this was done in India and it was published in the year the last of Dundee’s jute mills went out of production.
“A colleague suggested that so many historians in Dundee had already been over the archive material on the jute era that the bones were thoroughly picked clean,” Gordon explains.Passages in India”He suggested the best way to find new material would be to look at things from the other side. So I went to Calcutta and started looking in the archives there, and found some quite fascinating tales about Dundee’s links with the city.”
Some of Gordon’s research features in a new book, Jute No More, that was released by Dundee University Press last week. In it, he looks at the reasons behind the decline of Dundee’s jute industry.
It didn’t take long, he explains, for Dundee to fall behind its new industrial ally. “Dundonians helped set up the Calcutta jute industry and within 30 or so years they were doing it more cheaply and efficiently.
“I found a piece in a Calcutta newspaper from 1878. It said that the previous year Dundee had sent three million tons of jute to California. The following year, that had fallen to just 300,000 tons.
“California switched to buying jute from Calcutta because it was cheaper.”
Before long, Calcutta was acting in a manner not dissimilar to the OPEC countries that harbour most of the world’s oil supplies.
“They began regulating supply so they could control prices,” Gordon explains.
“Much like you see happening today, they claimed this was to maintain stability, but really they were just trying to make money hand over fist.
“I found complaints from Dundee about Calcutta’s domination of the market as early as the 1890s.”
Ironically, while Calcutta’s jute industry was harming Dundee’s economy, it was also providing one of the most surefire ways of enjoying a lifestyle that was out of reach of all but the wealthiest of Dundonians.
“Those Dundonians who went to work in Calcutta lived in gated communities,” Gordon continues. “They had large houses with gardeners, maids, cooks, butlers and cleaners.
“They had swimming pools and tennis courts. When they were still quite young they would have amassed enough money to come back and enjoy a comfortable retirement in Dundee.
“I found a record of a boy who left Harris Academy with just his basic certificate and went on to become very wealthy working in Calcutta. It was one of the few ways to make good money if you did not have much in the way of qualifications.”
This week and next, Gordon will be delivering the two prestigious public lectures at the University of Dundee. The first of the Leverhulme lectures, on Wednesday, has the unusual title Killed by an Umbrella: Dundee, Calcutta and the Endgame For Jute.
“It’s a play on the Bulgarian dissident who was killed on Waterloo bridge by a poisoned umbrella in the 70s,” Gordon says.
“Calcutta claimed to be holding an umbrella over Dundee, but in reality it was destroying the mother industry.”
The second lecture, taking place next Monday is Murder in Calcutta: Violence & Imperialism in a Calcutta Jute Mill.
“This was inspired by a case I came across of a Calcutta jute mill manager from Dundee, a man called Spencer, who beat to death one of the workers in his mill. The mill owner thought they needed a tough Dundee guy to control the labour force.
“He was arrested and put on trial no fewer than three times, because the British authorities wanted to show British justice was impartial in India.”
Spencer’s lawyer, however, took advantage of the poorly educated workforce’s inability to accurately read the time to poke holes in their witness testimony and the mill manager was acquitted.
“If you look at the sweep of the historical record you can see a lot of white people were brought to trial for crimes, but very few were jailed or executed.
“Really, what the British wanted was the appearance of justice.”Professor Gordon Stewart will be delivering Dundee University’s two Leverhulme Lectures. Killed by an Umbrella: Dundee, Calcutta and the Endgame for Jute is at the D’Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre at 6.30pm on Wednesday, March 16. Murder in Calcutta: Violence & Imperialism in a Calcutta Jute Mill is on Monday, March 21, at 6.30pm in the D’Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre. Tickets are free and are available via www.buyat.dundee.ac.uk Jute No More is available at a special discounted price of £17 for Courier readers. Go to www.buyat.dundee.ac.uk, add to basket then type in ‘DUP10’ to purchase, or phone 01382 384413 and quote ‘Courier.’