After a long period of research and writing, this book – which challenges many assumptions about the often overlooked and much misunderstood town of Dundee – is now published.
Jim Tomlinson, my co-author and I challenge some of the more common perceptions of Dundee as a grim industrial cul-de-sac (the phrase used by the Scottish nationalist stalwart and poet Hugh MacDiarmid). True, this is what Dundee became, after the First World War. Jute, the industry that dominated the town’s economy, politics and social and cultural life was by this time in long term but uneven decline.
Prior to this however, Dundee was one Scotland’s and Britain’s most thriving manufacturing centres.
Visitors recognised this – so much so that investigators from Glasgow, London and the USA sought to understand the reasons for this and even saw Dundee as a model industrial city. But the basis of Dundee’s initial success wasn’t jute, but linen. Jute eventually supplanted linen, but not until the 1850s. By this time Dundee was the UK’s leading producer of a vast variety of coarse linen cloth, including canvas for the navy. In part this was owing to markets across the Atlantic and, initially at least, to judicious government support. Baxter Brothers became the world’s biggest producer of linen and canvas cloth.
In short, ‘Linenopolis’ begat ‘Juteopolis’. It was expertise in the preparation, manufacture and sale of cloth derived from flax that eased the transition to jute – which boomed in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, largely owing to wartime demand for cloth made from jute, imported from Calcutta (now Kolkata).
What might surprise readers though, is the extent to which Dundee textile firms were involved in the production of rugs and carpets, in the form of cheaper imitations of Axminster, Brussels and other more prestigious names. A consequence of this however is the demotion of the oft-repeated idea that the move to jute in Dundee depended on the spinners’ access to whale oil, from the town’s whaling fleet, to soften the harsh jute fibre. But who would want their living or dining room rugs and carpets to be tainted with the foul odour of whale oil?
Industrial relations in Dundee have been typified as tempestuous, and the working lives of the largely female workforce as grim – overworked and underpaid in the mills and factories with little relief to be found in what were overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.
Again, this is undeniable, but much of what has been written on the lives of Dundee’s working people relates to the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond.
There’s evidence to suggest that master-worker conflict and the fraught atmosphere of Dundee’s workplaces and even on the town’s streets were more prevalent later on. During the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s Dundee was clearly a more desirable destination which provided opportunities for employment, regular wages and housing – not to mention shopping, and the kind of convivial urban social life that wasn’t to be found to the same degree in the countryside around Dundee, or in Ireland.
The Triumph of Textiles: Industrial Dundee, c.1700-1918 was published in November 2024 by Edinburgh University Press. Currently available only in hardback and as an e-book, a paperback edition is to be published later in 2025.
The original copies of the non-EUP images used above and, in the book, are all held by Archives, University of Dundee.
Jim and I will be talking about the book on 12 March (2025), at a free event hosted by the Abertay Historical Society. It will begin at 18.30 hours (6.30 pm) in Lecture Theatre 2, Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee.
