Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T08:44:59.511Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GLOBALIZATION: THE GENESIS OF DUNDEE'S TWO ‘UNITED FRONTS’ IN THE 1930s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

JIM TOMLINSON
JIM TOMLINSON*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
*
Economic and Social History, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Lilybank House, Bute Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RT[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Economic globalization has been a key force shaping British society since the mid nineteenth-century. This article uses a case-study of Dundee and its jute industry to examine the major issues that have arisen as the effects of those global forces have been responded to. Dundee was especially prone to detrimental effects from globalization because of its character as ‘juteopolis’, a one industry town with that industry subject to powerful competitive pressures from Calcutta producers from the 1880s onwards. In the 1930s these pressures became overwhelming, as cheap jute goods from India undercut the Dundee industry's home as well as export markets, and mass unemployment ensued. The local responses to this pressure were sharply divergent. There was both a ‘United Front’ between many elements in the local labour movement, mirroring the much-contested national calls for joint Labour and Communist party efforts, and a quite different ‘front’ bringing together jute employers, jute unions, local MPs, and the city council to call for protection for the industry. It is argued that this divergence can be used to explore key issues in the nature of the forces, national as well as local, operating on industrial cities and their populations.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 225 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Jim Phillips, Chris Whatley, and two referees for this journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 Daunton, M., ‘Globalization and deglobalization’, part ii of Wealth and welfare: an economic and social history of Britain, 1851–1951 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 199–319Google Scholar; Harley, C., ‘Trade, 1870–1939: from globalisation to fragmentation’, in Floud, R. and Johnson, P., eds., The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain, ii: Economic maturity, 1860–1939 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 161–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a critique of overly cyclical accounts of globalization, see Tomlinson, J., ‘De-globalization and its significance: from the particular to the general’, Contemporary British History, 26 (2012), pp. 213–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 I follow here the widely prevalent use of the term globalization, while recognizing that this term is heavily ideologically loaded, and that a more neutral term would be ‘internationalization’, stressing the significance of economic forces originating outside national boundaries. For the ideologies bound up with ‘globalization’, see Hirst, P., Thompson, G., and Bromley, S., Globalization in question (3rd edn, Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar, introduction. A further terminological complication is that over the last century the international economic forces acting on Britain have become geographically less global, and much more European; again, this point (very important in other contexts) is glossed over here, where, to reiterate, the concern is with economic forces originating outside Britain, whatever their precise geographical location.

3 Trentmann, F. and Bevir, M., ‘Social justice and modern capitalism: historiographical problems, theoretical perspectives’, European Legacy, 6 (2001), pp. 141–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the profound problems of using ‘experience’ as a key category for understanding the history of popular movements, Hirst, P., ‘The necessity of theory’, Economy and Society, 8 (1979), pp. 417–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 O'Rourke, K. and Williamson, J., Globalization and history (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 93–118Google Scholar; Huberman, M., ‘Ticket to trade? Belgian labour and globalization before 1914’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), pp. 326–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the underlying ideas are set out in Bhagwati, J., Protectionism (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

5 On the broad issues, Daunton, M. and Trentmann, F., eds., Worlds of political economy (Basingstoke, 2004)Google Scholar; for an attempt to argue that economic self-interest is all that matters, and that ideology is not important, Irwin, D., ‘The political economy of free trade: voting in the British general election of 1906’, Journal of Law and Economics, 37 (1994), pp. 75–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Trentmann, F., Free trade nation (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

7 The pervasive uncertainty of working-class life was, of course, a key assumption of Beveridge's foundational document on the welfare state: Social insurance and allied services, Cmnd 6404 (London, 1942). That economic uncertainty is the norm in modern British capitalism is nicely illustrated by the Bank of England's recent identification of forty-eight recessions in Britain since 1700: Hills, S., Thomas, R., and Dimsdale, N., ‘The UK recession in context – what do three centuries of data tell us?’, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 50 (2010), pp. 277–91Google Scholar.

8 Savage, M., The dynamics of working-class politics (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 17–38.

10 Daunton, M., ‘Britain and globalization since 1850: i. Creating a global order, 1850–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), pp. 1–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Dundee was also a significant source of overseas investment, and of emigrants. See Lenman, B. and Donaldson, K., ‘Partners’ incomes, investment and diversification in the Scottish linen area, 1850–1921’, Business History, 13 (1971), pp. 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmit, C., ‘The nature and dimensions of Scottish foreign investment, 1860–1914’, Business History, 39 (1997), pp. 42–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on emigration, Brock, J., The mobile Scot: a study of emigration and migration (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 124, 133Google Scholar.

12 Lenman, B., Lythe, C., and Gauldie, E., Dundee and its textile industry, 1850–1914 (Dundee, 1969)Google Scholar.

13 Beveridge, W., Full employment in a free society (London, 1944), p. 83Google Scholar.

14 Thus, for example, proposals to encourage jute growing outside India, such as in Sierra Leone: Dundee Chamber of Commerce (DCC) minutes, 28 Dec. 1905, Dundee City Archives GD/CC/4/8; more generally: S. K. Masrani, ‘International competition and strategic response in the Dundee jute industry during the interwar (1919–1939) and post-war (1945–1960s): the case of jute industries, buist spinning, craiks and Scott & Fyfe’ (Ph.D. thesis, St Andrews, 2010).

15 DCC minutes, 30 Mar. 1904.

16 The broadest and also most detailed treatment of Dundee's imperial interconnections is Stewart, G., Jute and empire (Manchester, 1998)Google Scholar.

17 Marrison, A., British business and protection, 1903–1932 (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar.

18 Tomlinson, J., ‘Responding to globalization? Churchill and Dundee in 1908’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), pp. 257–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Annual reports of Dundee and District United Trades and Labour Council, 1894–1905, University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre (MRC) MSS 524/4/1/7, 21,26,30,33

20 Walker, W.Juteopolis: Dundee and its textile workers, 1885–1923 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 148–98Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 290.

22 Gordon, E., Women and the labour movement in Scotland (Oxford, 1991), pp. 181–205Google Scholar; for women in jute, see also Wainwright, E., ‘Dundee's jute mills and factories: spaces of production, surveillance and discipline’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 121 (2005), pp. 121–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Constructing gendered workplace “types”: the weaver–millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry, c. 1880–1910’, Gender, Place and Culture, 14 (2007), pp. 467–82.

23 D. Lennox, ‘Working-class life in Dundee for 25 years 1878 to 1903’, Dundee University Archives (DUA) MS 134 (unpublished manuscript, St Andrews, 1928), table 127, records nine increases and ten wage cuts in jute piece work wages between 1878 and 1906.

24 Walker, Juteopolis, pp. 292–319.

25 Feinstein, C., ‘A new look at the cost of living, 1870–1914’, in Foreman-Peck, J., ed., New perspectives on the late Victorian economy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 151–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Trentmann, Free trade nation.

27 Baxter, K. and Kenefick, W., ‘Labour politics and the Dundee working class, c. 1895–1936’, in Tomlinson, J. and Whatley, C., eds., Jute no more: transforming Dundee (Dundee, 2011), pp. 200–3Google Scholar.

28 On the rise of class consciousness in Dundee politics, see Kemp, J., ‘Red Tayside? Political change in early twentieth-century Dundee’, in Whatley, C., Harris, B., and Miskell, L., eds., Victorian Dundee: image and realities (2nd edn, Dundee, 2011), pp. 217–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 A clear sense of Wilkie's views is given by his speech in Dundee in 1905, where he made the case for labour representation in parliament in the following terms: ‘They wanted as the representatives of Labour men who would endeavour to give equal opportunities to all who would strive to eliminate the evil conditions under which they laboured. Not because of class interest, but because the result would be for the benefit of the nation as a whole’, Annual Report of Dundee and District United Trades and Labour Council, 1905, MRC MSS 524/4/1.33.

30 In 1903, the ILP organized a national series of national demonstrations against tariffs, including one in Dundee: Baxter and Kenefick, ‘Labour politics’, p. 197.

31 Thane, P., ‘Labour and welfare’, in Tanner, D., Thane, P., and Tiratsoo, N., eds., Labour's first century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 80–118Google Scholar; Harris, J., ‘Labour's political and social thought’, in Thane, Tanner, and Tiratsoo, , eds., Labour's first century, pp. 8–45Google Scholar.

32 Fraser, W. H., ‘Trades councils in the labour movement in nineteenth-century Scotland’, in McDougall, I., ed., Essays in Scottish labour history (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 12–15Google Scholar; Annual report of Dundee and District United Trades and Labour Council, 1904, MRC MSS 524/4/1/30; Kemp, ‘Red Tayside?’, pp. 224–8.

33 A wages council was introduced in 1919: Sells, D., The British trade boards system (London, 1923), pp. 94–100Google Scholar.

34 Lennox, ‘Working-class life’, pp. 250–5. This could reflect the greater wage flexibility in textiles, producing lower levels of persistent unemployment, as well as the lower wages available to fund such benefits.

35 Rodger, R., ‘Employment, wages and poverty in the Scottish cities, 1841–1914’, in Gordon, G., ed., Perspectives of the Scottish city (Aberdeen, 1985), pp. 40–1Google Scholar; Huberman sees cheaper transport as crucial in increasing labour mobility leading to wage convergence and the breaking down of sectoral attitudes: ‘Belgian labour’, pp. 329, 337–45.

36 In 1901, jute employed 73.5 per cent of all occupied women: Walker, Juteopolis, p. 1.

37 Day, J., ‘The jute industry in Scotland’, in Jones, D., Duncan, J, Conacher, H., and Scott, W., eds., Rural Scotland during the war (London, 1926), pp. 276–83Google Scholar.

38 Gupta, B., ‘Why did collusion fail? The Indian jute industry in the interwar years’, Business History, 47 (2005), pp. 532–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Walker, Juteopolis, pp. 394–418.

40 Tomlinson, J., Morelli, C., and Wright, V., The decline of jute: managing industrial change (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

41 In 1923, the union fought a bitter but unsuccessful strike against measures to raise productivity by ‘rationalizing’ spinning operations in the industry: Walker, Juteopolis, pp. 486–528.

42 Though, until 1929, one of its seats was occupied by Edwin Scrymgeour, Britain's only ever Prohibitionist MP. Ideologically complex (not to say erratic), Scrymgeour styled himself ‘Prohibitionist-Labour’ and was usually a reliable supporter of Labour in the House of Commons. For Scrymgeour, see J. Kemp, ‘Drink and the labour movement in early twentieth-century Scotland with particular refrence to Edwin Scrymgeour and the Scottish Prohibition Party’ (Ph.D. thesis, Dundee, 2000).

43 Foot later defected from the pro-government ‘Samuelite’ Liberals, and his stance on protection was somewhat wavering, though he usually combined opposition to it ‘in principle’ with justification of it for Dundee as an ‘emergency measure’. In 1931, he wanted to make tariffs a ‘secondary matter’: Dundee Free Press, 15 Oct. 1931.

44 Hansard (Commons), vol. 314, 15 July 1936, cols. 2168–95; vol. 331, 2 Feb. 1938, cols. 239–305.

45 The Jute Control operated on the basis of forbidding the sale of imported jute goods below Dundee-established prices, combined with state trading in raw jute: Board of Trade, Working party reports: jute (London, 1948), pp. 13–16.

46 Johnston, T. and Sime, J., Exploitation in India (Dundee, 1925), pp. 4, 18–19Google Scholar; see also Johnston, T., Memories (London, 1952), pp. 67–81Google Scholar; Walker, G., Thomas Johnston (Manchester, 1988), pp. 59–91Google Scholar; Doud, G., ‘Tom Johnston in India’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 19 (1984), pp. 6–21Google Scholar.

47 Owen, N., The British Left and India: metropolitan anti-imperialism, 1885–1947 (Oxford, 2007), p. 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stewart, Jute, pp. 49, 98; more generally, Collins, P., ‘Brothers under the sun: British trade unions and the Indian labour movement in the interwar period’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 28 (1993), pp. 30–45Google Scholar.

48 Thorpe, A., The British Communist party and Moscow, 1920–1963 (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar; Worley, M., Class against class: the Communist party in Britain between the wars (London, 2002)Google Scholar; on the United Front and trade unions, Fishman, N., The British Communist party and the trade unions, 1933–1945 (London, 1995), pp. 48–106Google Scholar.

49 Dundee Courier, 14 Nov. 1935. In 1931, almost half of Communist voters (4,811 out of 10,264) were ‘plumpers’, i.e. did not use their second vote to support Labour or anyone else; Southgate, D., ‘Politics and representation in Dundee’, in Jackson, J., ed., The third statistical account of Scotland: the city of Dundee (Arbroath, 1976)Google Scholar, Table 12.5.

50 Williamson, P., National crisis and national government: British politics, the economy and the empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 97–8Google Scholar, 217–18. For similar uncertainty on this issue at the TUC, Booth, A. and Pack, M., Employment, capital and economic policy: Great Britain, 1918–1939 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

51 Cited in Dundee Free Press, 13 Oct. 1931.

52 Hansard (House of Commons), 15 July 1936, vol. 314, cols. 2180–7.

53 Hansard (House of Commons), 2 Feb. 1938, vol. 331, col. 256.

54 Ibid., cols. 258–9.

55 Ibid., cols. 261–2, 263.

56 Ibid., col. 265.

57 Nairne Stewart Sandeman, ibid., cols. 270–1.

58 Ibid., col. 278.

59 Dundee Free Press, 13 Oct. 1931; note also Marcus's attack on Dundee capitalists for exporting British jobs by investing in jute in Belgium and Czechoslovakia: Dundee Free Press, 22 Oct. 1931. The Free Press, a Labour-supporting newspaper published from 1926 to 1933, also frequently used the ‘big loaf/small loaf’ argument in the 1931 election, comparing the low price of bread in Britain with the price in protectionist countries: for example, Dundee Free Press, 15 Oct., 17 Oct.

60 Dundee Courier, 23 Oct. 1931.

61 Dundee Labour party, To the electors of Dundee (Dundee, 1935). Dundee Central Library: Local History Collection (DCL: LHC), Lamb collection 367(24).

62 Mann, Jean ‘The great betrayal’, in Dundee Labour yearbook (Dundee, 1937), p. 16Google Scholar, DCL: LHC, Lamb collection D6065G.

63 Dundee Courier, 13 Nov., 14 Nov. 1935.

64 These arguments were being made in the 1920s, and are still evident in the general election of 1945: People's History Museum CP/LOC/SCOT/1/11 Dundee Communist party minutes, 19 May 1925; Bowman, D., The case for jute (Dundee, 1945)Google Scholar.

65 The term was used in a headline in the Dundee Courier, 3 Mar. 1937: ‘“United Front” to press jute trade's claims’.

66 The AJSM had approached the union in 1919 about jointly pressing the government for protection against Indian imports, but the union, while willing to act with employers, wanted to press for action on Indian hours and conditions, not protection: DUA MS84/3/1 (2) AJSM trade meeting minutes, 7 Feb., 22 Apr. 1919; committee minutes, 4 Feb., 25 Feb., 10 Mar., 16 Apr. 1919.

67 MRC MSS 292/935.1/26, J. Sime to W. Milne-Bailey, TUC, 5 July 1932; ibid., ‘TUC research department meeting with representatives of the jute industry at the Board of Trade’, 17 June 1932.

68 DUA MS84/2 (21) AJSM annual report 1939; Menzies, I. and Chapman, D., ‘The jute industry’, in Silverman, H., ed., Studies in industrial organization (London, 1939), p. 247Google Scholar.

69 DUA MS84/5/3(4) AJSM fiscal sub-committee, 2 Feb. 1937, 25 Feb. 1937, DUA MS84/5/3(4).

70 DUA MS84/5/4 (2) AJSM meeting with worker's representatives, 13 Nov., 27 Nov., and 28 Dec. 1936; DUA MS 84/5/3(4) AJSM fiscal sub-committee, 2 Feb. 1937. The third jute union in the United Front was the bleachers, who, like the tenters, were small and male-dominated.

71 DUA MS84/5/4 (2) AJSM meeting with worker's representatives, 10 May 1937, 28 May 1937.

72 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Mar. 1937.

73 Ibid., conferences in connection with the jute trade, 18 Mar. 1937, 25 June 1937.

74 The provost from 1935 to 1938 was Phin, a Moderate and vice-chairman of the local Unionist party.

75 Ibid., 25 June 1937, 12 July 1937, 18 Oct. 1937, 8 Nov. 1937, 19 Sept. 1938.

76 Hansard (House of Commons), 2 Feb. 1938, vol. 331, col. 254.

77 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Mar. 1937: it is noteworthy that later in 1937 Reynolds was de-selected for his council seat, and he alleged that this reflected the fact that Dundee Labour party was ‘run by communists’: Dundee Courier, 1 Oct. 1937.

78 Dundee Courier, 19 Mar. 1937.

79 Ibid.

80 Dundee Courier, 11 Sept., 24 Sept. 1937.

81 Ibid., 3 Sept. 1937.

82 Ibid., 19 Mar. 1937.

83 Ibid.

84 Phillips, J., ‘The “retreat” to Scotland: the Tay road bridge and Dundee's post-1945 development’, in Tomlinson, and Whatley, , eds., Jute no more, pp. 246–65Google Scholar.

85 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Jan., finance committee sub-committee, 9 Jan. 1931.

86 In 1936, the largest delegations to the Trades and Labour Council were ten from the Transport and General Workers Union, nine from the Amalgamated Engineering Union, eight each from the National Union of Railwaymen and the shop assistants union, with six from the DDUJFW: Dundee Labour yearbook (Dundee, 1936).

87 Denver, D. and Bochel, J., ‘The political socialization of activists in the British Communist party’, British Journal of Political Science, 3 (1973), pp. 53–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Dundee Courier, 14 May 1937.

89 S. Tolland, ‘“Jist ae wee woman” – Dundee, the Communist party and the feminisation of socialism in the life and works of Mary Brooksbank’ (Ph.D. thesis, Aberdeen, 2005).

90 Sime, J., ‘Report on DDUJFW’, in Dundee Labour yearbook (Dundee, 1937), p. 42Google Scholar, DCL: LHC D6065G.

91 Tolland, ‘“Jist ae wee woman”’. For the parallel case of cotton, Bruley, S., Leninism, Stalinism and the women's movement in Britain, 1920–1939 (New York, NY, 1986), pp. 199–220Google Scholar.

92 Though we know almost nothing directly about ‘consumer politics’ in Dundee, though the Free Trade League was active, helped by funds from one of Dundee's jute barons who remained faithful to liberalism, John Caird: Trentmann, Free trade nation, pp. 105, 109, 119.

93 Harris, ‘Labour's political and social thought’, pp. 16–17.

94 Ritschel, D., The politics of planning (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 After 1945, the union was to press strongly for the continuation of jute control in peacetime, to preserve employment in jute: for example, ‘TUC: European free trade area – jute industry’, 12 Mar. 1958, MRC MSS 292/629/3; more generally, Tomlinson, Morelli, and Wright, Decline of jute.

96 Toye, R., ‘The Attlee government, the imperial preference system, and the creation of the GATT’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), pp. 912–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomlinson, J., Democratic socialism and economic policy: the Attlee years, 1945–1951 Cambridge, 1997), pp. 23–46Google Scholar.

97 In the run-up to the Ottawa conference of 1932, there were strong hopes in Dundee that a trade agreement helpful to Dundee would be reached, but these hopes were soon dashed. Under the agreements at Ottawa Indian jute goods had free access to the British market. For example, DUA, MS 270/1/1/1 Dundee Conservative and Unionist Association, executive minutes, 28 Apr., 12 Oct. 1932.