Jute and Empire: The Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire

273 Pages·1998·3.228 MB·English

by  Gordon T. Stewart

JUTE AND EMPIRE
The Calcutta Jute Wallahs
and the Landscapes of Empire
GORDON T. STEWART
General editor John M. MacKenzie
When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor
John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon
the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as
significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’.
With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime
concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared
covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining
aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the
environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies,
and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present
comparative work on European and American imperialism, and
particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The
fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating,
and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest
possible range of studies in the field. Studies in Imperialism is fully
organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge,
responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-
expanding area of scholarship.

Jute and empire
Western medicine as contested knowledge
ed. Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews
Unfit for heroes
Reconstruction and soldier settlement in the Empire between the wars
Kent Fedorowich
Empire and sexuality
The British experience
Ronald Hyam
‘An Irish Empire!’
Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire
ed. Keith Jeffery
The empire of nature
Hunting, conservation and British imperialism
John M. MacKenzie
Propaganda and empire
The manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960
John M. MacKenzie
Imperialism and popular culture
ed. John M. MacKenzie
Gender and imperialism
Clare Midgley
Colonial masculinity
The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’
Mrinalini Sinha
The imperial game
Cricket, culture and society
ed. Brian Stoddart and Keith A. P. Sandiford
The French empire at war, 1940–45
Martin Thomas
Travellers in Africa
British travelogues, 1850–1900
Tim Youngs
Jute and empire
The Calcutta Jute Wallahs
and the Landscapes of Empire

Gordon T. Stewart

MANCHESTER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Manchester
Copyright © Gordon T. Stewart 1998
The right of Gordon T. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS
ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER, M1 7JA, UK
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 0 7190 5439 7 hardback
First published 1998
5 05 03 02 01 00 99 98 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
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appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval
by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton
CONTENTS
List of tables — page vi
General editor’s introduction — viii
Preface and acknowledgements — ix
Glossary — xii
List of abbreviations — xiii
1 The significance of jute 1
2 The rise of jute, 1838–1928 38
3 Jute in crisis, 1928–1955 93
4 ‘To the greater glory of Scotland and to the benefit of
Bengal’ 147
5 Jute and empire 191
Bibliography — 243
Index — 256

[ v ]
TABLES
1 Number of jute looms by country, 1940 page 16
2 Exports of raw jute from Bengal, 1890–91 72
3 Exports of raw jute from Bengal to all countries, 1867–1914 81
4 Exports of raw jute from Bengal to the United Kingdom,
1867–1914 82
5 Calcutta exports of gunny bags and gunny cloth to all
countries, 1879–1914 82
6 Percentage of jute crop consumed in India, 1893–1920 86
7 Exports of jute yarn, jute piece goods, jute sacks and bags
from European countries, 1924 and 1928 102
8 Dividend returns for ten pre-1914 mills, 1927–30 112
9 Dividend returns for two recently established Indian mills,
1928–31 112
10 United Kingdom imports of jute piece goods from Calcutta,
1934–36 129

[ vi ]
For Jacqueline,
Amy and Becky

[ vii ]
GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
From its inception more than ten years ago, the Studies in Imperialism
series has been committed to the publication of books which demonstrate an
interactive interpretation of the imperial history of the European powers.
This book not only illustrates but triumphantly vindicates such an
approach. It is clearly impossible to understand the economic, social,
cultural and political dimensions of that quintessential imperial process, the
growing, preparation and manufacture of jute, without setting it into the
multiple contexts of Bengal, Dundee, colonial and international trade, and
European and American rivalries.
In doing so, the book adopts significant fresh approaches to imperial
history. In his inaugural lecture as Smuts Professor at Cambridge, A.G.
Hopkins called for a more satisfying interweaving of the economic and
cultural elements to imperial history.1 Too often these have been conducted
in isolation so that economic history floats free of the essential cultural
contexts in which economic processes have to be understood, while cultural
history has been even more culpable in ignoring the vital economic, social
and class bases upon which it must be constructed. Edward Said’s Culture
and Imperialism is notable in this regard.2
Gordon Stewart interleaves the economic and the cultural in an
exemplary way. This book marks a fresh departure which all other economic
and cultural historians will have to take note of. Moreover, it reflects a new
interest in the regionalisation of imperial history. While imperialism has to
be understood in its globalising tendencies, its effects on specific regions of
both the European metropole and imperial territories are increasingly viewed
as highly significant. Consequently, we have here a major contribution to
the histories of Scotland, of India, of Dundee and of Bengal, as well as of
imperial and international trading relations. In the process, the somewhat
monolithic and unidirectional approaches of much post-colonial scholarship
are undermined. From the last decades of the nineteenth century, Dundee
looks increasingly like the colony, Bengal the economic metropole. For an
understanding of this striking paradox, read on.
John M. MacKenzie
Notes
1 A.G. Hopkins, ‘The Future of the Imperial Past’, Inaugural lecture delivered 12 March
1997 (Cambridge, 1997).
2 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993).

[ viii ]
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I grew up in Dundee, and I thought that the Scottish city was the centre of
the world jute trade. This impression was dinned into me by my geography
lessons at school and by a host of childhood encounters with jute. When I
felt depressed by the drabness of life amidst the rows of identical, rain-
stained buildings on the housing scheme where I lived, I would pedal my
bike down to the docks and watch hundreds of bales of jute being unloaded
from the holds of great cargo steamers which had sailed half-way round the
world from Chittagong and Calcutta. On the way home from school I would
sit on city buses crowded with women workers coming off their shifts with
wisps of jute sticking to their hair and clothes, and their hands roughened
red by the handling of jute in the factories. On football Saturdays I stood at
the window of a one-room tenement flat watching thousands of Dundee
working men, their caps down and shoulders hunched against the northern
cold, slouching past the gloomy walls of a jute mill. From high on the Law
Hill I looked down on the forest of smoking chimneys as the mills busily
turned out their jute goods for the world’s markets. These images provided
graphic testimony for natives like me of Dundee’s jute primacy. Because of
the names on the sterns of the cargo ships and the faces of the crewmen, I
understood that there was an Indian dimension to jute. I also learned of this
connection by listening to family stories about relatives and friends of my
parents who had spent time in India. But in my mind these anecdotes simply
constituted an exotic footnote to Dundee’s leading role. Apparently I was
(and am) not alone in thinking in such ways. The Dundee Heritage Trust
announced in 1997 on its web site for new Verdant Works Jute Museum
(http://www.dundeecity.gov.uk) that ‘By the end of the 19th. century,
Dundee’s stature had grown to such an extent that the city supplied all the
world’s demand for jute products’.
Ever since those childhood days I have been intrigued by the history of jute
and by the Scottish-Bengal connection. But although I am a historian of
empire, I did not think the jute topic was a significant one for the history of
imperialism precisely because it seemed so localised in Dundee. It was only
when I began a more serious investigation that I discovered how partial my
patriotic Dundee upbringing had been. For over a hundred years from the
1830s to the 1950s jute was a major item in the global economy – from San
Francisco to Sevastapol, from New York to Hamburg, from Cairo to Rio,
much of the international trade of the day was carried in jute bags and jute
cloth. While Dundee had an interesting role to play in this international
trade, the main player in the story of jute was an Indian city. By the 1890s
[ ix ]