Dundee and India: Roots, Rivalry and Interdependence

A lecture by Professor Christopher Whatley, 22 February 2005

© Chris Whatley, University of Dundee, 2005

We are gathered here this evening to learn something about the relationship between Dundee and India and, I hope, to rekindle it.

Yet at first sight it is not at all obvious why such a relationship should have developed. Scotland is tucked away to the north of the continent of Europe from which it is separated by the North Sea. It is cold, certainly in comparison to India. Traditionally, Scotland's links were with England, with whom the Scots frequently quarrelled, with Ireland and those parts of Europe that were within relatively easy reach: Scandinavia, the Baltic, the Low Countries and France. Although penurious Scots had long sought opportunities abroad, until the end of the seventeenth century few skippers of Scottish vessels ventured even as far south as the Mediterranean. India is very much further to the East and even since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 Scotland and India were still separated by some 9,000 sea miles and a journey that could last at least four weeks. Prior to that, and the appearance of steamships, the hazardous voyage round the southern tip of South Africa could take up to six months.

Nevertheless the explanation of how and for what reasons Dundee and India forged particularly close links is not altogether some kind of historical anomaly. The context of the relationship is to be found in the great shifts in world power over the course of the past three centuries: the demise of the Indian Mogul empire and the strengthening grip of the English East India Company over the Indian sub-continent, and the expansion of the English empire overseas - culminating after 1858 in the period of the British raj in India, and direct rule. After 1707 and the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain Scotland had become a major contributor to and beneficiary of what had become the British empire, often in a military capacity , here depicted at the Battle of Lucknow which followed what the British called the Indian Mutiny and Indians the First War of Liberation. India of course was one of the empire's crown jewels, symbolised in Queen Victoria's adoption of the title of Empress of India, although the situation was to change dramatically in 1947 with Partition and Indian Independence.

Other forces at work and which provide us with a framework within which we can understand Dundee's links with India include the unparalleled expansion in world trade in the eighteenth century and particularly the nineteenth century; industrialisation and the mechanisation of production including the impact of steam technology, all facilitated by international transfers of capital, technology and labour, elements of what we now call globalisation.

We don't know for certain when the first Scots arrived in India, let alone the first Dundonians. But what we can be fairly sure about is that more of them would have set foot on Indian soil and established trading relations with India earlier than they did if two ventures proposed at different ends of the seventeenth century - companies for trading with Africa and the Indies - had succeeded . Perhaps because it looked as if they might, pressure from the English East India Company was brought to bear, the Scottish schemes were blocked and instead the Scots were forced to look west across the Atlantic to establish a trading colony. Thus the 1695 Company of Scotland for Africa and the Indies established a settlement at Darien on the isthmus of Panama in Central America instead of India, but by 1700 the Scots had been driven out by a combination of bad planning, bad luck, fever and Spanish troops.

So it wasn't until after the Scots had acceded to the demands of the British monarch Queen Anne and English politicians for incorporating union in 1707 that many of them began to venture out to India, under the auspices of the East India Company. Indeed in part to dampen Scottish dissatisfaction with the Union, which failed to provide enough posts for job-hungry Scottish politicians, and to deal with the sense of grievance felt by Scots about their loss of political independence, the English government persuaded the East India Company to make available more postings for their grumbling brethren from the north. In short, while jobs for members of the Scottish nobility and gentry and their offspring and dependents were in short supply in London, there were plenty in India, even though the chances of making it back to Scotland after a spell of Indian service, were rather poor - with shipwreck and disease combining to produce mortality rates of 50 and 60 per cent. Nevertheless, Scots flocked to join up, capitalising on their reputation as valiant soldiers and seamen, as able surgeons and lawyers and canny merchants. Scots arrived in India in disproportionate numbers, typically at a young age - 15 or 16 - in the hope that they could return home twenty years or so later with enough to buy a small estate or other property. These were the so-called nabobs who in many cases led the process of agricultural improvement in Scotland on the estates they purchased with their Indian windfalls. It is little wonder then that Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist observed that India was the 'cornchest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our younger sons as we send our black cattle to the south'.

Indeed it is in the service of the East India Company that we encounter the first Dundonians with an Indian connection. Dundee in the second half of the eighteenth century was a small but prosperous port town with a growing interest in textile production, primarily coarse linen cloth, much of which was sold to clothe slaves in the American and West Indian plantations. But it was as seamen that Dundonians first encountered India, the earliest I can find being a Charles Rait, a merchant's son who learned his trade in European and Atlantic waters before serving as the fourth mate on The Stormont, an East Indiaman, between 1779 and 1780, the first of a number of similar postings. Between 1750 and 1813 at least six men from Dundee rose to the rank of commander of a merchantman in the East India Company. No other Scottish port appears to have provided so many captains for the Company's service. Although in proportionately smaller numbers, Dundee born men served too as officers in the Bengal army at roughly the same period.

It is possible too that Dundee can claim to have been the home town of the first Scottish female to travel to and live in India for a time - during the 1770s. This was the portrait painter Catherine Read, who was drawn to Madras by family connections - her brother was an East India Company surgeon - and, as was so often the case with Scots who went to India, to earn some money. Read did obtain commissions, painting pictures of what were described as 'Indian ladies of quality', but like many of her countrymen she found the heat oppressive and died, her health weakened by her stay in India, on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in 1778. During the same decade another artist with Dundee connections, the Edinburgh-born George Willison whose uncle, George Dempster of Dunnichen, was a Director of the East India Company, also ventured east and like Read, found employment, in Willison's case painting pictures for British residents but also a series of prestigious regal portraits of the family of the Nawab of Arcot, Mohammed Ali Khan, some of which have survived . Unlike Read, Willison did get back to Scotland, so richly rewarded for his six years work that he was able to retire on the proceeds, before the age of 40. The Scots' interest in India however was not solely opportunistic or commercial. There was a group of Scots, much influenced by Enlightenment thought and analysis, who were concerned about the impact of British rapaciousness on Indian society, who were struck by the immensity and antiquity of Indian culture and who sought to understand its history, to preserve its manuscripts and artefacts and who understood as they struggled in Britain to save the Scots tongue, the importance of maintaining and disseminating in print Sanskrit. Scots orientalism however had its limits and it failed to stem the tide of Scottish Presbyterians who sought in India as elsewhere to instil amongst the indigenous population a belief in Christianity; fortunately perhaps they had little success - fewer than 3500 Indian converts were brought into the Free Church fold between 1830 and 1880. Scottish educationalists had a greater impact, probably because they relegated the task of converting Hindus to Christianity to a secondary role.

These factors however only indirectly begin to explain the strength of the Dundee-India connection. What brought the two worlds together was jute. Jute was a plant grown in the intermittently wet and dry but hot environment found on the Ganges plain . Millions of acres were ultimately devoted to the cultivation of jute, the work of planting, cutting , retting and drying being carried out by hundreds of thousands - ultimately millions - of small peasant proprietors, ryots, who typically held a couple of acres of land on which they could either grow rice or jute, depending on which promised the better return. Indians had long made use of jute, as a foodstuff, for hand-spun ropes, bedding cloth, sacks and clothing for the poor. And although jute products were of some significance for the regional economy, sales were largely restricted to neighbouring coastal districts and southeast Asia - although what is often overlooked is that even as Dundee began to manufacture machine-made jute cloth, Calcutta hand weavers were managing to put out and sell abroad over 9 million gunny sacks a year.

How then and why did this crop ever reach Dundee? As I've said, Dundee in the eighteenth century had established itself as the centre of coarse linen manufacturing and distribution in Scotland. But in the first half of the nineteenth century Dundee merchants and merchant-manufacturers turned what was primarily a putting-out industry where most work was done by hand in cottages and sheds, into one in which mills and factories predominated and turned out more machine-spun linen yarn and powerloom-woven linen cloth than anywhere else in Britain. Dundee's mill- and factory-proprietors were particularly astute observers and borrowers of technology used elsewhere, Leeds for example, which they then adapted and improved for their own purposes. They drew in displaced rural dwellers from the surrounding countryside and exploited long-standing links with the north of Ireland to recruit workers from there, many of whom were young, single and female. There were problems with flax and linen however: the price of the raw material was rising (and by 1830 was four times the price of jute); supply routes from Russia and the Baltic were subject to interruption and became acutely so during the Crimean War, and competition was increasingly fierce in this low end of the textile trade.

The East India Company had on a couple of occasions in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tried to interest British textile manufacturers in jute. Linen manufacturers though were reluctant to use it at first, even mixed with flax, as such cloths attracted lower prices. Another difficulty was that by the time jute reached Dundee what had originally been damp and supple fibres had become dry and coarse and impossible to spin with machines. Fortuitously however Dundee had a modest-sized whaling fleet and it was discovered that the whale oil introduced during the batching and carding process softened the fibres and so facilitated machine spinning . It was a dirty, foul-smelling business however.

But there was another factor at work, this time on the demand side of the equation. In the nineteenth century jute became the world's leading packaging and bulk-goods carrying material, a role it played until containerisation became commonplace. Jute was strong and it was cheap and, quite simply, without it the great arteries of global trade in the last two centuries would not have been able to flow: it was in jute sacks and bags that cotton, sugar, grain, coal and other essential commodities were carried. Jute was used a carpeting material on its own and later as backing for carpets and linoleum and as roofing felt - but there were countless other uses to which jute was put, including shoe and boot linings and tailors' padding. It played a massive role during wartime. The two world wars of the twentieth century would have looked very different had sandbags, canvas and tarpaulins not been available; indeed it was during periods of war that both Dundee and Calcutta experienced their greatest periods of prosperity, although in both Calcutta did better than Dundee - indeed in the first World War Calcutta effectively supplanted Dundee in the United States market.

It was during the Crimean War and the American Civil War however that Dundee's firms expanded most rapidly - in the last case as cotton imports from the American south were cut off and jute was used as an alternative. Jute, baled in India began to reach Dundee in steamships owned by the jute manufacturers solely for this purpose . The Cox family in Lochee, like the Baxters at Dens, laid out great industrial settlements , which included not only the mills, factories and calendar works, but also churches and industrial schools. Cox's works were the biggest in the world, but the Baxter's weren't very far behind . These and the proprietors of the other leading firms constructed buildings that were not only functional but which also declared the civility and cultural aspirations of their owners . So from the 1850s until the 1880s, fluctuations apart, Dundee and its inhabitants enjoyed over thirty glorious years of expansion . Dundee led the world and, in the main, the workers in the industry seemed content, proud even of their place as the world's leading producer of coarse linens and jute. Labour relations, strongly infused with paternalism, were good, and it was not unusual for poems or other tokens of esteem to be produced for retiring mill proprietors . The opening of Baxter Park, on land donated by Sir David Baxter of Baxter Brothers, the family that also endowed University College, now the University of Dundee, attracted the biggest crowd in the city's history , and included men, women and children from all ranks who gathered to demonstrate their gratitude to their benefactors.

Henceforth, the heartbeat of Dundee's economy and the city's wellbeing was to depend to a large degree on the state of the jute harvest and the price which the jute importers could negotiate . By the 1860s and through to the early part of the twentieth century no other large Scottish town would be so dependent upon a single industry; no other large town had such a large proportion of its employed population in manufacturing, nor such a high proportion of female workers, including married women, in its workforce. Dundee was a town for work, regardless of gender or whether you were old or young. Children - half-timers - were employed in distressingly large numbers.

By the end of the century, the boom over, the social effects of half a century of struggle to compete in lower grade textiles were highly visible, deeply damaging and would be long-lasting. How could it be otherwise in an industry where 1/96th of a penny per yard could make the difference between securing an order or not and where, accordingly, wages were amongst the lowest for textile workers in Britain. In Scotland only Glasgow's housing was as bad as that of Dundee - this is the part of the city centre district of Dundee at the end of the nineteenth century , and the two cities had unusually high infant mortality rates. In Dundee working class women looked old and haggard before their time - this domestic servant from around 1900 is in her 30s - and hundreds of Dundee's men were rejected for army service as they were too small, too thin and too light. Workplace conflict intensified towards the end of the century, although little was gained from masters whose inclination was to cut rather than raise wage rates.

In part this was the result of Indian rivalry - although we shouldn't overlook the emergence of competition elsewhere, particularly from Europe. But as had been recognised as early as 1855, when Dundee's jute industry was in its infancy, jute cloth could be made considerably more cheaply in India, or more precisely in West Bengal which was in close proximity to where most of the jute crop was grown. In and around Bengal too there was an ample supply of labour that could be enticed to work in the mills and factories that from the mid-1850s began to be erected on the banks of the river Hooghly , leading, over time to the urbanisation to the region as small towns and villages grew into densely populated cities. Coal too was fond in the vicinity. Nearby Calcutta was a relatively wealthy city, whose landlords, gentry and members of the Marwari dynasty could be encouraged to invest in what at first were European-led companies. Some but not a great deal of this capital came from Dundee. Much of this was devoted to the construction of the Samnuggur Jute Factory, which was floated in 1873 by Thomas Duff and Company and managed by William Smith, who had formerly worked for Cox Brothers in Lochee. Another was the Titaghur Mill, which opened in 1882. But Dundonians tended to send their surplus capital across the Atlantic, not to the east; most of the capital invested in India was from London and other parts of England, from Glasgow in the west of Scotland and from India itself.

Where Dundee played its part was less through the provision of capital and enterprise but more often in the form of jute manufacturing technology and machinery, the construction and layout of mills and factories, engine houses and chimneys, and the technical knowledge of spinning, weaving and finishing and even the skills required to manage large numbers of workers in factories. In these respects Dundee led the rest of the world. Orders flooded in to Dundee companies like Douglas Foundry and Lilybank Foundry, both of which had been instrumental in building and maintaining the first jute mills in Dundee. The range of products called for included iron girders, castings, engine house parts, chimney stalks, shafting, pulleys and hundreds of other kinds of millwright work . Mill managers and foremen from Dundee and educated at the town's Technical College were in particular demand - and indeed few mills on the Hooghly were without a Dundee overseer, manager or mechanic. Unlike in Dundee, where access to water and space were at a premium and mills and factories and much housing had to be built several storeys high, and in which conditions were cramped and airless, most Indian mills were well-built, single storey structures , spacious and well-lit - something that often came as surprise those who had grown accustomed to life and work in the densely packed town of Dundee, its mills and chimneys crammed alongside the deteriorating housing stock. But this is not to suggest that industrialisation in the Calcutta region was without its problems, far from it. Calcutta's slums were arguably the worst in the world; infant mortality rates in Calcutta were higher even than in Dundee, while the incidence of TB increased four-fold between 1880 and 1911. It was in large part the problems of rapid urbanisation - and the opportunities for improvement that these presented - that drew the visionary town planner Patrick Geddes to India in 1914 and in 1918 he took up a post at Professor of Sociology at Bombay University. Geddes had been one of the first Professors - of Botany, here, at University College Dundee, and had seen at first sight the horrendous consequences of unchecked industrial expansion.

There were drawbacks to life for mill mangers and others so far away from Dundee: separation from family, relatives and friends - although more senior men could take their wives with them. Many found the climate difficult and new diseases posed a threat too - Geddes lost his wife to dysentery and fever in India; there could be a sense of social isolation - one of the striking features of life for most Dundonians in Calcutta was that men and women of their station were largely excluded from the upper echelons of British society in India; they were not the 'jute wallas', the owners of the managing agencies who luxuriated in a life of colonial ease and the superiority of their class, but instead they were kept in their place, most commonly in compounds which housed other Europeans of similar rank.

But there were enormous attractions too. One was well put by a visitor to Calcutta from Dundee in 1894; 'When the mill assistant arrives out in Calcutta his circumstances undergo a change. He may have been known in Dundee as Sandy Tamson; but once out here he is changed at once to Alexander Thompson, Esquire, weaving master, and all his letters are so addressed. He lives well.' This and other correspondents remarked on the rather grand accommodation that men like this inhabited in India - fine houses with well-laid out gardens, swimming pools, and tennis courts ; they were provided too with servants who cooked, washed and in other ways made their lives on the compounds considerably more comfortable than anything they would ever know in Dundee - which actually had fewer domestic servants per head of the population than the other main Scottish cities. Some mill managers had horses and carriages. Real wages too were higher than in Dundee. Although it wasn't always the case, certainly in the early years men from quite ordinary backgrounds in Dundee commanded enormous respect from their workers. James Robertson, a Dundonian mill manager who was credited with selecting the site of the Samnuggur mill, was presented by some locals on his retirement in 1885 with a testimonial which commended him for his conduct towards the superintendents and the Indian-born clerks who wrote and spoke English, and others under his direction. His management style, they declared, induces 'a feeling of awe and respect towards him'. By this date it is almost certain that nothing similar would have come from the pens of the raucous and rowdy, far from deferential and increasingly strike-prone mill girls in Dundee. In the woman's town that Dundee had become, patriarchy was under attack, and it was to India that Dundee men had to go if they wanted to find respect and deference. Even though labour relations were much more tempestuous in the Indian mills by 1947, when it became difficult to distinguish industrial disputes from political demands for independence, there were still instances of quite remarkable displays of affection for the managers sent out from Dundee. On this occasion a G Graham Smith, a kerani or office manager, was thanked by his Indian office workers for his 26 years service.

Let's jump back from 1947 though and return to the late nineteenth century. It took some time for what was happening in India to fully register amongst Dundee's jute princes. Even as late as 1888 Dundee-India relations continued to be benign. In that year a grand Indianopolis Bazaar was held - 'the most important ever held in Scotland' its organisers claimed, with the aim of raising funds for the Victoria Art Galleries in the town's Albert Institute.

But it wasn't long before a more competitive edge to the relationship began to emerge. The reasons for this are easy enough to understand. Following a slowish and far from certain start in mechanised jute production, Calcutta surged ahead during the 1880s and 1890s. As this graph shows, the number of power looms in Dundee began to peak while in Calcutta numbers rose increasingly rapidly.

While profits in Dundee's jute industry were squeezed after the 1870s , those in India soared to over 100 per cent in some years. In Dundee expansion was checked almost overnight. Ward Mills, which were situated within a few hundred yards of where we are now and depicted at the top of this advertisement from the 1880s, never looked like this. The section to the left of the central tower was left unfinished until the works closed in 1958. By contrast, for the Indian economy jute was of growing importance, and through the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century jute overtook opium, grains and cotton to become the country's leading export. By 1921 jute accounted for more than a quarter of India's exports, Calcutta had become by far and away the world's leading jute producer. Dundonians didn't like to admit it, but by this time they were a long way behind and could never catch up. The Marwaris and other Indian manufacturers were perfectly capable of making the best grades of jute yarn and cloth, on high speed spinning frames operated by an efficiently managed workforce. The highest number of employees recorded in the jute and linen trades in Dundee was 37,000. By 1928 Calcutta had ten times as many, 339,000, which wasn't far short of twice the entire population of Dundee. Ominously, Dundee and the other jute manufacturing centres in its vicinity were beginning to lose money.

Dundee's jute manufacturers and labour leaders reacted in a variety of ways. There was some rationalisation, new machinery was brought in, labour efficiencies were sought and efforts were made to open up niche markets - the expansion of the motor car trade for example created opportunities for jute manufacturers to make wrappings for rubber tyres and bindings for the new tarred roads. Dundee's Chamber of Commerce helped too, by striking deals with the Baltic republics for the supply of bacon and ham wrappers. Much energy was devoted to complaining though. Attention was drawn to the long hours worked in the Calcutta, to low wages and the inadequacy of the Indian Factory Acts. During 1920s the industry's leaders and the city's MPs lobbied in London for protection from Indian imports. The crisis deepened in the 1930s with the world slump in trade and over-production in Calcutta. Dundee's jute industry was faced with extinction, but the fact was that within the context of the political economy of the British empire and the raj, the Indian jute industry was immeasurably more important than that of Dundee. Cotton had led the industrial revolution in Britain, not jute, and the Lancashire cotton lobby had much more political clout than could be marshalled by Dundee's two MPs. It was a brutal lesson to learn and it is little wonder that in Dundee there has until relatively recently been something of a sense of inferiority, of being second best, a belief that nobody cared about the place, because in Whitehall and the India Office nobody much did.

The Second World War lifted spirits for a time and the industry in Dundee was protected until 1960, a step that became politically possible after Indian Independence . But the jute industries of both Dundee and Calcutta suffered contraction in the second half of the twentieth century. The Partition of Bengal in 1947 separated the main jute-growing region, first East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, from the mills and factories in West Bengal and raised production costs. Dundee was adversely affected too as the price of raw jute - which had been too high at £20 a ton before the War, rose to £100 and then three times that with the outbreak of the Korean War. Both Dundee and Calcutta were dealt a further blow in the 1960s when polypropylene, derived from oil, began to replace jute as the principal material for carpet backing and for other industrial uses too, as in geo-textiles. As part of the process of contraction and withdrawal on the part of Dundee interests, in 1976 the management and control of the Dundee companies in India passed finally to Calcutta, where jute is still being manufactured. From the 1980s the Indian government has acted to support the jute industry with legislation such as the Jute Packaging Materials Act (1987) which insisted that certain materials such as grains, sugar and fertilisers should be wrapped in jute products.

In Dundee there is little of the industry left, other than as a small scale manufacture. After a century and a half of involvement, the last jute yarn was spun in Dundee in 1999. Many mills have been pulled down and the palatial mansion houses that housed the jute barons have been sub-divided; several of the mills that remain have been converted for use as housing or into premises for small businesses. There is of course the very fine museum at Verdant Works, and the industry lingers on in popular memory, although this is becoming dimmer as those employed in the jute trade age and die. This is also the case with those Dundonians who continued until the 1960s to find employment in the Calcutta mills. The subject of this recent obituary, Sandy Jamieson, worked for the Anglo-Indian Jute Company between 1949 and 1954.

The movement of people between this part of Scotland and India has not all been one way however. The tide appears to have begun to turn at the start of the twentieth century. 71 Indians, probably sailors in the jute carrying trade, were recorded in the 1911 census for Dundee. The jute connection also brought a stream of students from India who studied for the Certificate in Jute Manufacture at the College of Technology. Others came over in the 1920s and 30s to train as doctors at University College; the Saggar family was particularly notable in this regard, and has left a permanent mark in having a street, Saggar Street, named after Jainti Saggar, a GP, a Labour Councillor and advocate of Indian Independence. His brother founded the Dundee branch of the Friends of India Association, in 1934. Many Indians have remained and become part of the fabric of the city. The 2001 census reveals that of the 1000 or so inhabitants of the city of Dundee classified as Indian, almost 200 are of pensionable age, which suggests they've been here for some time. The educational link has survived the demise of jute, and at the present time there are some 73 students from India at this University. There are also a number of Indian members of staff.

In conclusion then, it is clearly jute and empire that lay at the heart of the connection between Dundee and India. But there are links which pre-date jute, that existed beyond jute and which have outlasted the industry's decline. There has been intense rivalry between Dundee and its district and Calcutta and its hinterland, even though in that competition there was only ever going to be one winner. But there has also been co-operation. The two places were interdependent. Dundee needed the raw material, jute, and in the early stages of modern jute manufacturing in India, the industry there needed what Dundee could provide: some capital, but more importantly Dundee's cutting-edge knowledge of the technology of jute production, its capacity in mill-related engineering and the skills of its managers and mechanics. Elements of Scottish cultural life were exported too: apparently one of the great public rituals in Calcutta were the annual St Andrew's Day dinners.

The two regions have shared too in the triumphs and human tragedies which are part and parcel of the industrialisation process, including the miseries of rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation. In both countries the story of jute is only partly told if we ignore the role of low-paid and hard-worked labour; the relationship between Dundee and India has been as much to do with the people below as the people above. The people of both regions too have experienced the debilitating effects of industrial decline. Dundee has only begun to fully recover from the best part of a century in this condition in the past twenty years.

But I want to end by looking forwards rather than looking back: despite what I've said about the global significance of jute, and notwithstanding the efforts of a number of academics from this country, from the United States and from India to explore aspects of the industry's history, our understanding of most of the issues I've been talking about over the past half hour or so is remarkably slight. We know much more about coal and cotton and wool and tea and coffee and probably even herring than we do about jute, although the Indian side of the industry is better researched than Dundee. There is no comprehensive study of Dundee's jute industry and historians are only just beginning to explore the relationship between Dundee and Calcutta in any detail. In preparing this talk I wasn't able to go to a single text but instead had to gather together bits and pieces of information from a variety of sources - helped I should say by Greg Lloyd, Caroline Brown, Lesley Lindsay and Derek Patrick from this University and Andrew Mackillop of the University of Aberdeen. Thanks to all of them. Yet here at Dundee University, in the Archives, we have one of the world's biggest collections of records relating to the jute industry. It is more than a collection of business records though, interesting as these are. There are treasures here for historians of Indian politics and the political economy of jute, for those interested in comparative labour conditions and labour organisations, in health and welfare, rural society and cultural adaptation and cultural continuities - to name but a few topics.

My hope is that by this talk, but more so as a result of seeing or hearing about the exhibition that the High Commissioner will open very shortly, we can raise awareness of and perhaps even inspire scholars here and elsewhere to make greater use of the collection. The manufacture of jute no longer binds Dundee and Scotland and India in any significant way, but perhaps by studying, in partnership, the industry's past we can ensure that the links forged between us over the last three centuries are not only maintained in the future, but also strengthened and enriched.