Based on fascinating primary research in India, England, and Scotland, this book represents a new departure in the writing of imperial history. JUTE AND EMPIRE follows the intriguing story of the rivalry between Calcutta, India, and Dundee, Scotland, from the 1830s to the 1950, as these two cities competed in the world jute trade.

Dundee had an interesting role to play in the jute trade, but the main player in the story of jute was Calcutta. This book follows the relationship of jute to empire, and discusses the rivalry between the Scottish and Indian cities from the 1840s to the 1950s and reveals the architecture of jute's place in the British Empire. The book adopts significant fresh approaches to imperial history, and explores the economic and cultural landscapes of the British Empire. Jute had been grown, spun and woven in Bengal for centuries before it made its appearance as a factory-manufactured product in world markets in the late 1830s. The book discusses the profits made in Calcutta during the rise of jute between the 1880s and 1920s; the profits reached extraordinary levels during and after World War I. The Calcutta jute industry entered a crisis period even before it was pummelled by the depression of the 1930s. The looming crisis stemmed from the potential of the Calcutta mills to outproduce world demand many times over. The St Andrew's Day rituals in Calcutta, begun three years before the founding of the Indian Jute Mills Association. The ceremonial occasion helps the reader to understand what the jute wallahs meant when they said they were in Calcutta for 'the greater glory of Scotland'. The book sheds some light on the contentious issues surrounding the problematic, if ever-intriguing, phenomenon of British Empire. The jute wallahs were inextricably bound up in the cultural self-images generated by British imperial ideology.

Using Dundee in Scotland as a case study, this 12-hour free course explored some of the debates surrounding the economics of British imperialism.

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.

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital. Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

This is a new OCyglobalOCO history of the Scottish city of DundeeOCOs industrial era which combines economic, political and social history and explores the significance of empire for British policy."e;

What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.