THE remarkable history of the rise of Dundee as a global industrial powerhouse, and its demise, has been “badly treated,” historians have argued in a new book.
Dundee’s history has long been associated with its jute production and was once known as Juteopolis in the 19th and early 20th centuries for its leading role in the textile industry.
The jute industry has long been seen as central to the city's history and working-class heritage, but in a new book, The Triumph of Textiles: Industrial Dundee, the importance of the city’s jute trade pre-1850 has been challenged by historians.
According to the book's co-author, emeritus professor of Scottish History at the University of Dundee, Chris Whatley, the city had been “badly treated” by not only historians but also by commentators.
The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid once described the city as a “grim monument to man's inhumanity”, with the late William Walker, a leading labour historian, also describing Dundee in the late 19th century as a large manufacturing center of “physically r******d children, overworked women and demoralised men”.
Whatley argues that although squalor and social conflict became the norm after the 1870s, before that, Dundee was one of Scotland’s industrial powerhouses – a fact too often overlooked.
“Most of the historical work that's been done on Dundee was post 1850, so they didn't even look at what happened before 1850,” Whatley said.
He added: “When people came to Dundee in the 19th century, they saw a bustling town, they saw a town that was committed to work.”
William Chambers, a well-known publisher and politician, commended Dundee in 1847 as he contrasted the city’s “indomitable spirit” with Edinburgh's “idle opulence,” as he was impressed by Dundonians' work ethic.
The city also drew praise as far as the United States, as Professor Waterhouse, who came from Washington in the 1880s, said Dundee was an impressive spectacle of manufacturing greatness.
Waterhouse admired the Scottish city's textile industry and wanted to take what he learned from Dundee over to the United States, Whatley explained.
He added: “There's an issue here. What is the truth?
“Is it the 20th-century commentators and historians who've got it right, or is there something wrong here?”
In The Triumph of Textiles, Whatley, along with Jim Tomlinson, argues that linen was as important to Dundee before 1850 as jute was afterwards and that the significance of jute pre-1850 has often been exaggerated by historians.
They outline that traditionally Dundee’s success was attributed to the production of cheap coarse cloth for sacks and bagging, but many firms manufactured high-quality, admiralty-grade canvas, and colourful rugs and carpets.
According to the pair, Dundee-produced carpets could be found in millions of working-class homes across Britain, but the city’s prominence in floor coverings has been little known until now.
“There's a book which came out about 20 or 30 years ago called Carpeting the Millions, and it was about the British carpet industry, and there's not a single mention in there of Dundee,” Whatley said.
“Yet so many of Dundee's big textile companies were carpet manufacturers.
He added: “They were imitations if you like, but that's what ordinary people could buy, and that changes the perception to me of Dundee because it's normally associated with just sandbags, jute cloth, but in fact this is highly colored fabrics.”
Due to the rapid expansion of Dundee’s textile industry, thousands of Scots flocked to the east coast city, but its fortunes declined due to competition from India and the rise of synthetic fibers, which contributed to the deindustrialisation of the area.
Whatley explained that one of the main reasons why Dundee’s jute industry thrived while other cities that tried to establish their own industry, like Glasgow and London, failed was because of the experience it had in the textile trade before the 1850s.
“Dundee is described as juteopolis, when actually, until the 1860s, Dundee was Britain's leading linen manufacturer.
“So in fact, you could call it linopolis.”
He added: “That might seem a sort of a semantic kind of point, but it's very important that Dundee succeeded when Glasgow, London, and others who tried to make jute didn't is because Dundee had developed a whole lot of skill in working with coarse text, coarse fibers.
“Linen is made from flax, which is a coarse kind of fiber, and so is jute.”
The book also outlines how Dundee benefited enormously from the British Empire as the city’s textile industry produced osnaburg, a strong, lightweight, natural-colored cotton fabric, which was sold in vast quantities to the southern states of North America for slave plantations.
The book also explores other aspects, like debunking the myth that Dundee was a culturally deprived city, and also looks at the relationship between jute barons and their workers.
You can find The Triumph of Textiles: Industrial Dundee here.
