The ebb and flow of economic globalization has been one of the central features of British history for the last century and a half.Footnote 1 The exposure of economic activity to forces originating from outside the nation-state raises profound questions about how those affected will understand the issues raised, and how they will respond.Footnote 2 We can plausibly link those responses to contemporary understandings about the costs and benefits of such exposure, but this, of course, raises the problem of properly characterizing how such calculations were framed; the effects of globalization were experienced, but the key issue is how that experience was interpreted. Footnote 3
This article focuses on the history of one set of local responses to globalization, and in trying to understand the interpretations that such responses deployed it uses two analytical starting points. First, the idea of ‘distributional coalitions’, where responses are seen as tied to calculations about the likely consequences of globalization for economic prosperity, with the idea that mobilizing social forces for and against globalization will depend upon forging effective alliances between disparate winners or losers. This is the most common framework used in historical analyses of globalization, and it yields useful insights.Footnote 4 But the dangers of too single-minded use of such an approach are evident: a reductive assumption that responses to globalization are simply about the distribution of clearly understood economic costs and benefits, wholly ignoring both the contestable status of such calculations and, even more importantly, the deep cultural and political embeddedness of ideas associated with the phenomenon.Footnote 5 Most obviously, responses to globalization in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century have been greatly affected by ideas about free trade, which, as Trentmann has recently re-emphasized, was a doctrine whose political and cultural appeal went far beyond its claimed economic benefits.Footnote 6
A second framework which gives useful traction on the issues surrounding responses to globalization is one which starts from the pervasive economic uncertainty of life for the mass of the population in modern Britain, because of their overwhelming reliance on wage labour.Footnote 7 This starting point is used very effectively by Savage in his study of Preston.Footnote 8 He links this uncertainty schematically to three possible popular responses: ‘mutualist’, which seek to reduce the degree of reliance on wage labour; ‘economistic’, which seek to ensure job security; and ‘statist’ which seek to get the state to ensure measures of security. He is concerned to stress how these ‘choices’ are linked both to local social relations and to local politics.Footnote 9 While not to be used dogmatically, this framework offers a useful way in to the issues, as it allows the ‘choice’ between these three responses to be in part the result of social conditions and political argument, while not detaching them from compelling economic forces.
Britain before 1914 was the most economically globalized country in the world.Footnote 10 Within Britain, the degree of exposure to global forces differed greatly according to local and regional patterns of economic activity, but Dundee had a claim to be the most globalized city in Britain, above all because of its status as ‘juteopolis’, a term reflecting the extraordinary level of its reliance on one industry which in turn was exceptionally ‘globalized’.Footnote 11 Around 50 per cent of the city's workforce was directly employed in the jute industry in the Edwardian period, and many more were indirectly affected by its fortunes. The industry was wholly reliant on imported raw materials, and 60 per cent of its output was exported. For Dundonians, the keys to their economic well-being lay in the fluctuations in the Bengal jute harvest and prices, the world demand for grain and other primary commodities (much of which was transported in jute bags), and the extent of international competition in the production of jute goods. On the consumption side, they were also, of course, like every one in free trade Britain, hugely affected by trends in world food prices.
After its heyday in the 1850s and 1860s, the Dundee jute industry was subject to increasing competition, especially from India, as well as frequent fluctuations in output and employment.Footnote 12 Globalization thus injected a great deal of uncertainty into the lives of most Dundonians. Despite foreign competition, the industry was on an expansionary path until the early 1900s, but after a boom in the First World War, the interwar period was one of decline, with mass unemployment especially evident in the 1930s, when Dundee had some of the highest unemployment rates in Britain.Footnote 13
This article examines the responses in Dundee to these global pressures. The first part summarizes these responses in the pre-1914 years as a prelude to the second, third, and fourth sections, which focus on the context of the interwar period, and then more specifically on the politics of the 1930s. The final section suggests some implications of Dundee's experience for our broader understanding of British globalization and responses to it. While the approach is framed by the concept of ‘globalization’, in the case of jute and Dundee this globalization had an obvious imperial dimension: the main competition came from an empire country. How far this imperial dimension shaped the response to economic pressures is returned to in the conclusion.
I
Dundee's jute's employers were acutely aware of the complex international environment in which they operated. Until the 1880s, under free trade, most of this environment had to be taken as given, though there was occasional talk of seeking to influence the growing and marketing of raw jute to reduce its price fluctuations. But from the 1880s, external pressures on the industry from Indian, and to a lesser extent continental European, producers led to a strong rise in protectionist sentiment, evident in debates in the Dundee Chamber of Commerce.Footnote 14 In 1904, the first protectionist motion got through the chamber, though this reiterated support for the principle of ‘unrestricted free trade’, before going on to support ‘freedom of action in fiscal negotiations’.Footnote 15 As the main competition in finished products was from an empire country, India, the employers recognized that issues of imperial policy were inescapably at stake in the jute discussions.Footnote 16 Recognition of the sensitivity of advocating controls on Calcutta's production led Dundee's jute manufactures to a focus on two possibilities, a discriminatory duty on Bengal's raw jute exports, favouring empire users, or tariffs on continental European (but not Indian) imports into Britain.
The tide of sentiment against free trade amongst jute employers from the late nineteenth century was similar to that elsewhere in industrial Britain. This trend towards protectionist politics was part of a wider shift of allegiance amongst industrial capitalists from long-standing support for Liberalism to Conservatism (or Liberal Unionism), driven by a range of concerns, from Irish home rule to tax policy, as well as trade issues.Footnote 17 In Dundee, this trend culminated in a major jute employer standing on a (carefully qualified) protectionist platform for the Unionists in a by-election in 1908, and being defeated by a strongly free trade Liberal, Winston Churchill.Footnote 18
This electoral failure of protectionism was part of a national pattern in Edwardian Britain, but can be placed in the context of the local employers’ failure to persuade the mass of the local electorate that it was the answer to Dundee's problems; the absence of a ‘producers’ alliance’ binding employers and workers together to defend the industry. That failure can be thought of along several dimensions. First, the employers had no significant organized body of jute workers with whom to make an alliance. While trade unionism in Dundee strengthened from the 1880s, this was concentrated outside jute. The strongest unions were amongst engineers, shipbuilders, railway workers, and bakers.Footnote 19 In jute, a clergyman, the Reverend Williamson, organized a union which survived from the 1880s to the 1920s, but whose membership was always a tiny fraction of the workforce.Footnote 20 The rival Dundee and District Union of Jute and Flax Workers (DDUJFW) founded in 1906, had a pre-war peak membership in 1913 of 8,500, amounting to 20–25 per cent of the industry's workers.Footnote 21
Most jute workers were women, and they proved unenthusiastic about union membership. These women were not passive in the face of their conditions, and there were frequent outbreaks of unrest amongst them, often accompanied by spontaneous demonstrations and ‘unruly’ behaviour, to the distaste of the local bourgeoisie and respectable (male) trade unionism alike. The Reverend Williamson's union was aimed precisely at regulating such challenges to dignified industrial relations.Footnote 22 The behaviour of female jute workers created what, with only slight exaggeration, we may call ‘collective bargaining by riot’, usually occasioned by the periodic slumps in the jute industry, leading to employer attempts to reduce money wages.Footnote 23
Jute was very far from having embedded, orderly industrial relations: before 1914, there emerged no effective, representative body of jute workers which, if they had been so inclined, the employers could have sought support from on the protectionist agenda. Only transiently, in the wake of a big strike in 1912, was there any sign that the employers would, very grudgingly, grant any formal recognition to the union.Footnote 24
If money wages for jute workers showed no clear trend before 1914, as for all British workers, real wages (at least up to the 1890s) were significantly improved by the global fall in food prices.Footnote 25 It was that improvement – 'the big loaf’ – which many historians have seen as crucial to widespread popular support for free trade in these years, though as Trentmann has powerfully reiterated, the attractions of free trade went beyond its impact on food prices: there was a wide-ranging political ideology linked to free trade supported by large portions of the working class.Footnote 26 The reversal of this global price trend after the turn of the century is usually linked to the wave of industrial unrest in the immediate pre-war years. Such unrest was evident in Dundee, and reached a considerable pitch in 1911 and 1912, with major strikes or lockouts amongst carters, dockers, and jute workers.Footnote 27 However, this unrest did not lead to a major shift in a direction likely to make an alliance with employers more likely; on the contrary, by reinforcing notions of class conflict, it had the opposite effect.Footnote 28
The ideology of free trade, and embodied in political parties, provided another huge obstacle to any producers’ alliance in jute. In 1906, the city elected one of the first two Labour MPs in Scotland (in a two-member constituency). However, this MP, Alexander Wilkie, was a clear ‘Lib-Lab’ in ideology, and in 1908 he opposed putting up a Labour candidate to fight Churchill because of a desire not to disrupt Liberal/Labour good relations.Footnote 29 These relations were grounded on the very limited ideological or policy divergence between the two parties. Whatever the overall significance of Dundee's election of its first working-class trade unionist MP, it presented no challenge to the city's traditional electoral support for advocates of free trade. To the left of Wilkie, the Independent Labour party also expanded in the Edwardian period, but on trade they shared the Labour party's anti-tariff politics.Footnote 30
Nationally, a key part of the broad ideology supporting free trade was distrust of the state, and, by implication, scepticism as to whether a policy of state intervention, such as protectionism, was likely to favour the mass of the population. Popular belief in the efficacy of state action (local or national) was very limited in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, even amongst socialists.Footnote 31 There is clear evidence of such doubts in Dundee in attitudes to the local state. While organized labour sought to gain a place in Dundee's local government, it was often sceptical of the likely benefits to be gained by the workers from expanding local government action, and as a result commonly allied itself against proposals for increased rate-financed expenditure, in the name of defending the interests of the workers as ratepayers.Footnote 32
Also important is the state's absence in jute in the one sphere where nationally such a role was commonly supported by organized labour, that of wage regulation. It was well established that jute manufacture was a poorly paid employment, but it was never officially regarded as a ‘sweated’ industry, and hence did not have a wage board to set minimum wages.Footnote 33 In sum, Edwardian Dundee was not a place where advocates of state intervention in economic life could point to persuasive examples of its benefits.
With generally weak trade unions as far as industrial bargaining was concerned, and limited faith in the benefits of state action, popular responses to economic uncertainty led to considerable mutualist activity. In 1905, total trade union membership stood at around 15,000 in the city, with over 4,900 of those entitled to death benefits, 3,800 to sickness benefits. However, out of work benefits were most prevalent in the non-textile (predominantly male) sectors, and within jute, only the tiny unions of skilled male workers provided such support.Footnote 34
The failure of a producers’ alliance to emerge in pre-1914 Dundee reflected the weakness of jute trade unionism, and the liberal politics of the majority of the organized working class. These forces were strong enough to outweigh characteristics of the local economy which might have underpinned an alliance. Unlike the Belgian workers discussed by Huberman, Dundee's jute operatives faced big obstacles to moving out of the industry; Dundee is geographically remote, and there was no sign of wages converging with other Scottish industrial cities.Footnote 35 Within the city, there was no big employment sector outside jute, especially for women.Footnote 36 Married women, especially were effectively barred from most other occupations. So it was despite such conditions favouring a narrow, local view of their interests that, while Belgian labour moved from protectionism to free trade, in Dundee a long-established commitment to free trade was undisturbed by challenges from organized labour.
In sum, there was much discontent with the consequences of globalization in pre-1914 Dundee, and this reached a climax in the unrest of the 1900s when, alongside problems of market instability, real wages were squeezed. But there was never any prospect that this discontent would be channelled into a significant local movement for protectionism, or an alliance between employers and the forces of labour.
II
Dundee (and Calcutta) jute did well in the First World War, above all because of the demand for sandbags.Footnote 37 But as in other ‘old staple’ industries, wartime prosperity and immediate post-war boom conditions were quickly followed by a slump, with only limited recovery in the later 1920s. In the great depression of the 1930s, the situation became immeasurably worse. World trade in agricultural products, much of it carried in jute bags, fell precipitously. In Calcutta, where production capacity had grown sharply in response to war demands, the excess capacity problem was enormous, and while, in the 1920s, it had to some extent been contained by a cartel and production restrictions, in the 1930s, this proved unsustainable, and prices fell sharply.Footnote 38 For Dundee, this meant a sharp increase in Indian imports; where previously competition from the sub-continent had largely been felt in export markets, now the home market was being invaded. The consequence was rapid output contraction and mass unemployment. Clearly, the economic environment for Dundee in the inter-war years, and especially the 1930s, was much more persistently adverse than before 1914.
Wartime conditions had encouraged the growth of the DDUJFW's membership, albeit one which shrank as the industry's fortunes faded after 1920.Footnote 39 In response to this initial union strengthening, the jute employers created their own representative body, the Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers (AJSM), and it was this body, rather than the Chamber of Commerce, which increasingly co-ordinated the employers’ activities both inside and outside the industry. The association's effectiveness was enhanced by the creation through amalgamation of two dominant firms in the industry, Jute Industries Limited and Low and Bonar.Footnote 40
From 1919, wages in the industry were regulated by a Wages Council. As the boom collapsed after 1920, this council, against union opposition, decreed successive wage reductions in the industry. However, after 1923, this process of cuts halted for the rest of the decade, as the employers seem to have recognized that some kind of ‘floor’ had been reached in the wage level. This can be linked in part to a new focus on the employers’ part on raising productivity as a more plausible route to competitive costs, alongside the long-established strategy of trying to move the industry's products ‘up-market’, though this was a process severely limited by the coarseness of the fibre, with, especially, its consequent unsuitability for use in clothing.Footnote 41 Wage cuts resumed in the early 1930s, but even more than in the 1920s, employers seem to have recognized that such a policy was a desperate expedient rather than a sustainable strategy to secure the industry's survival.
At the parliamentary level, the political trajectory of Dundee in these years in many respects followed the national path. Churchill (still just a Liberal) was defeated in 1922, and for the rest of the decade Dundee became a solidly Labour city in parliamentary elections.Footnote 42 But in 1931, as part of Labour's national debacle, it shifted to a combination of Conservative and National Liberal MPs, with the election of Florence Horsbrugh and Dingle Foot respectively.Footnote 43 Horsbrugh was to pursue strongly the protection of jute in parliament, initiating two major debates in the Commons.Footnote 44 However, the National government, mindful of the growing pressure for Indian independence, resisted these demands and Indian jute imports were uncontrolled until the Jute Control was introduced in the run-up to war in 1939, a move justified on the basis of the strategic significance of the domestic supply of sandbags and other jute manufactures in wartime.Footnote 45
In the relationship between jute and the global economy, a notable event of the 1920s was the mission to India of the leader of the jute union, John Sime, and the Dundee Labour MP, Tom Johnston, to the Calcutta mills. Their report argued that at the time they visited (1925) there was little direct competition between the lower-quality products of Calcutta's industry and the relatively more sophisticated output of Dundee. But, they said, given the prospect of such competition in the future, British labour should give strong support to strengthening Indian jute unions, so that ‘what competition there may one day be should not be of international starvation or based on the misery and degradation of the workers’. They also favoured strengthening the Indian Factory Acts.Footnote 46 This stance was in line with most British labour thinking about India in the 1920s, though it led to only very limited practical support. Perhaps, as Owen argues, ‘Even if conditions in the Calcutta bustees and the Dundee slums bore some similarities, cultural misunderstandings formed too high a barrier to permit any real interaction.’Footnote 47
III
In the 1930s, two ‘United Fronts’ emerged in Dundee, with radically different perspectives on how to respond to the crisis in jute.
One of these Fronts mirrored the well-known national movement towards advocacy of co-operation between the Communist and Labour parties. Historians of the Communist party (CP) have argued about how far the changing positions of the British party simply followed the dictates of Moscow, but that there was a huge shift in policy in the early 1930s is clear.Footnote 48 In the so-called ‘Third Period’ (1928 onwards), labour and social democratic parties had been denounced by the Communists as ‘social fascists’, while from around 1933/4 these same parties were embraced as partners in the common struggle against fascism. In parliamentary terms, in Dundee, this meant that where in 1931 the Communists had fought a bitter campaign against Labour (and gained 10,000 votes), in 1935 they did not put up a candidate, and actively supported Marcus and Gibson, the Labour candidates.Footnote 49
This United Front was opposed to protection. This was a long-standing position which the parties (or certainly their official representatives) adhered to throughout the interwar period. For Labour, this was a continuation of the approach of pre-1914, noted above, rooted in a combination of recognition of the benefits of cheap food, hostility to tariff-induced industrial monopoly, and solidarity with workers in other countries who would be hurt by cuts in British imports. These official positions had wobbled in the face of the world depression after 1929, but the election of an avowedly protectionist National government in 1931 seems to have revived Labour's anti-tariff politics.Footnote 50
In 1931, the Labour manifesto (entitled ‘Plan or Perish’) rehearsed these arguments in the following terms:
The Labour party has no confidence in any attempt to bolster up a bankrupt capitalism by a system of tariffs. Tariffs would artificially increase the cost of living. They would enrich private interests at the expense of the nation. They would prejudice the prospect of international co-operation … in the face of the millions unemployed in high tariff America and Germany, they are clearly no cure for unemployment.Footnote 51
At the national level, the Labour arguments were also clear in the Commons debates on jute. Their spokesman in the 1936 debate (Emmanuel Shinwell) followed the line of attacking both free trade and protection in general, and advocated a policy of economic planning and the increase of purchasing power. The specific suggestion was linked to Argentina, and the suggestion that increasing purchasing power in Britain would increase food imports from Argentina, which would give ‘a much needed stimulus to trade’.Footnote 52
In 1938, the second major parliamentary debate on jute brought greater clarity about what Labour would do about the industry; the party's amendment to the protectionist motion read as follows:
taking note of the effects of the exploitation in the jute industry in Bengal by British and other capital, calls upon the Government to promote an international conference for the purpose of fixing minimum standards of labour conditions and imposing an international prohibition of imports of goods produced under conditions below those standards so long as there is an alternative supply of such goods produced under fair and reasonable conditions.Footnote 53
In his speech supporting this amendment, its proposer (McLean Watson) argued that he was no free trader, on the contrary ‘I have been more or less a protectionist since I started work – not a protectionist for the capitalists, but for the workers. I want to protect the workers’ interests from the capitalists, whether the capitalists be British or foreign.’Footnote 54 He went on to stress how the Calcutta jute industry was financed and organized by Dundee: ‘That is where the trouble began and how it began.’ Finally, he stressed that if protection was introduced in jute this would be like Britain treating ‘the Dominions as they treat foreigners’.Footnote 55
Thus, Labour had a clear policy: ‘the prohibition of Indian goods coming into this country when they are produced in India under worse conditions than in Dundee or other parts of this country’ secured by international agreement.Footnote 56 But it was a policy which even its proponents recognized would take a long time to bring into effect. As a critic put it, ‘I do not believe that, if the Amendment were carried, there would be a trade union left in Dundee because, by the time theories could be put into effect, Dundee would be shut up.’Footnote 57 Dingle Foot also suggested the implausibility of Labour's policy – it would mean that if the proposed international conference reached agreement, the countries involved would be ‘expected to fix standards of labour and wages in excess of those which now obtain in their countries, knowing that that would immediately lead to a cessation of their export trade’.Footnote 58
National Labour party views were reproduced in the local debate in Dundee. In his first speech in the 1931 campaign, Marcus attacked tariffs in the following terms:
When tariffs are applied you may reduce unemployment in certain industries but you will double unemployment in other industries. The policy of tariffs will undoubtedly suit certain wealthy manufacturers in this country just as the Great War suited those manufacturers. The policy of tariffs won't suit the common people because tariffs mean that the prices of commodities which are purchased by working class housewives will go up enormously and the purchasing power of each home will be correspondingly decreased.Footnote 59
Later in the campaign, Marcus stressed that Labour did have a policy for the provision of work:
We propose to take the initiative in bringing together an international conference to regulate hours of labour throughout the world. We believe that you can't provide work for industrialist [sic] countries unless it is based on an agreement throughout the world … this was an age of internationalism, and all nations must come together.Footnote 60
In the election of 1935, the same view was put forward: the local Labour manifesto followed similar lines of argument, asserting that the National government's tariff policy ‘has not only strangled our Overseas Trade by raising up national barriers to commerce between all the countries of the world, but has also created enmity between the nations and thereby endangered the peace of the world’.Footnote 61 When a new Labour candidate was selected in 1937 she continued to attack tariffs, calling protection ‘the great betrayal’ which had led to rising food prices equivalent to a cut in the real wage of 7 s per week.Footnote 62
The CP put less faith in international agreements than the Labour party, but likewise supported the view that protection was at odds with international worker solidarity. They supported the Labour candidate's argument in 1935 that nationalization was the appropriate policy for the jute industry.Footnote 63 In the long run, they argued, the only effective way to protect Dundee jute workers’ jobs was to raise wages in India, by strengthening trade unions, and in the even longer run by achieving independence for India.Footnote 64
Dundee's second United Front was of an entirely different type, involving an alliance between the jute unions, the jute employers (acting through the AJSM), the city council, and the Chamber of Commerce (but excluding the local trades and labour council, and the CP), to press the government for protection.Footnote 65 This alliance seems to have arisen from two main forces. This United Front did not fully emerge until 1937, but as early as 1932 there is evidence that the main jute union, the DDUJFW, was willing to take a protectionist stance.Footnote 66 In that year the union urged the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to meet a deputation from the AJSM, who had prepared a memorandum for the Ottawa conference on imperial trade, in which the association called for protection against Calcutta goods. Sime, for the union, made it plain that the union backed the employers’ protectionist stance.Footnote 67
The impetus for protection was greatly increased when, in the wake of the collapse in the cartel in Calcutta, imports of Indian jute manufactures into Britain surged. Retained imports of jute piece goods from India rose from 54·4 million square yards in 1930 to 179·3 million in 1937, and, while the registered unemployment percentage was stable in the later 1930s, the numbers employed in the industry continued to contract, from 40,000 in 1930 to 30,000 by 1937.Footnote 68
While nothing came of these initial representations, the DDUJFW continued to approach the Board of Trade about conditions in Dundee, despite being firmly told there was no prospect of tariffs on Indian jute goods. With the surge in imports after 1935, and seeking a more effective avenue, they eventually approached the employers directly to see whether they would agree to a joint approach.Footnote 69 This approach followed a routine union–employer meeting, where the employers stressed their inability to raise wages because of Indian competition. This argument seems to have drawn the Tenter's union into support for a protectionist alliance.Footnote 70 A joint union–employer meeting was held, and in turn met representatives of the Board of Trade.Footnote 71
Simultaneously, in March 1937, the newly elected Labour majority on the town council called on the provost to convene a meeting of interested parties ‘with the view of coming to some decision to press upon the government the necessity of meeting this very serious threat to the life of Dundee workers and to the social and economic well-being of Dundee as a whole’.Footnote 72 The meeting which followed involved the unions, the employers, the town council, and the Chamber of Commerce. This agreed to form a delegation from the four parties to ‘wait upon the President of the Board of Trade with the view of persuading him to institute a quota on manufactured goods being imported into the country’.Footnote 73
For the next eighteen months, the council took the local lead in pressing the government for protection against Indian competition, seeking support from Scottish MPs and the secretary of state for Scotland. These efforts had a bi-partisan character; while the council reverted to Moderate (i.e. Unionist) control in November 1937, after a year of a Labour majority, these activities continued.Footnote 74 The council emphasized the loss of local rate income brought about by the collapse of jute, and the threat that Dundee would become a ‘Distressed Area’ requiring government financial support.Footnote 75
In the House of Commons debate of 1938, Horsbrugh pointed to this United Front:
last year there was a deputation which I think is unique in the history of the City of Dundee. It was a deputation which consisted of the Lord Provost, members of the town council – and at the time a majority of the town council were members of the Labour party – members of the employers organizations and the employees, led by the Labour trade union secretary, a representative of the Chamber of Commerce and both MPs representing the City of Dundee. That was a unique deputation.Footnote 76
Important local Labour figures in Dundee, both union leaders and councillors, were pursuing a policy at odds with the official doctrine of their national party, and with the CP with whom Labour was involved in a local electoral United Front. The initiative in the council was taken by John Reynolds, who was also a leader in the bleacher's union.Footnote 77 He rested his case for united action partly on the argument that ‘when they went to the employers for an increase of wages for the operatives they found that the industry had not got it to give them’ and he expressed the hope that ‘the jute trade should return to such a prosperous condition that they would have a “good old scrap” fighting for the proceeds of the industry’. This was combined with the claim that ‘it was not his intention nor did he think it was the intention of those representing particularly the workers side of the industry, to do anything detrimental to the economic interests of the jute operatives in India’. He ended his argument with the plea that ‘we should on this occasion leave side all our political theories and have a united front of employers and employees’.Footnote 78
Sime, leader of the main jute union, claimed that on one occasion he had been told that pleas for protection against India were rejected because of the government's desire to create ‘a happier India’. In his view, Sime asserted, ‘the British government ought to be concerned first of all with a happy Britain’.Footnote 79 This was something of a trope in the debates of the 1930s, a Dundee Courier editorial suggesting ‘it is surely unthinkable that an important home industry should be sacrificed because the unfair competition comes from an Empire source’ and on another occasion saying that the sacrifice of Dundee to Calcutta was ‘the way to make Empire ideas unpopular’.Footnote 80 At times this argument could lead the staunchly-Conservative Dundee Courier into stances which could have been endorsed by Labour:
It is a case for laying the strongest emphasis on the dictum that the first duty of a British government is to the British people. That many thousands of them should be sacrificed to the wealth-pursuing impulses of Indians in Bengal which have produced the present disastrous over-supply of jute goods is an intolerable thought.Footnote 81
One of the Labour councillors on the delegation to the government was of Indian descent, Dr Saggar. In his contribution to the discussion prior to the visit to London, he stressed the interconnectedness of the fortunes of Dundee and Calcutta asserting that ‘as long as cheap labour in India, working under both British and Indian capital, went on increasing, the over production of cheap commodities would have a detrimental effect on Dundee’, going on to assert that ‘My India people don't want to see their friends in Dundee in distress owing to their being employed in those industries at a cheap rate of wages.’Footnote 82
In forming a United Front with the employers, the Dundee trade unionists and councillors did not give up in principle the view of the other United Front that the long-run solution to the problem of Indian competition was higher wages and better conditions in India. Sime retrospectively noted his visit to India with Tom Johnston in the mid-1920s, and said ‘he was not without hope, and he would like to see India giving us the lead in the matter of a 40-hour week’.Footnote 83 But the tone suggested this was a pious hope, and that he knew it to be so.
IV
How do we explain this divergence on the Left about how to respond to the crisis in jute? Why did two ‘United Fronts’ appear in the city?
First, we must note the important role of the town council. The 1920s saw the council subject to bitter battles related to the economic problems of the city. Partly this related to new responsibilities taken on by the council, notably housing. Dundee was a pioneer in the provision of council housing, but like many other places in the 1920s it faced a battle between holding down council rent levels and pressure from ratepayers. The Moderates, who dominated the council, and had a majority throughout the interwar period except in 1937/8, favoured house-building as a way of easing unemployment, but wanted this done from central government grants, and wanted the ratepayers contribution minimized. A second bitter issue was relief for the unemployed, which, alongside the developing National Insurance scheme, still had a considerable element of local determination through the Poor Law, and then Unemployment Assistance Boards.
These disputes, and the desire to restore prosperity to improve the council's finances, provided an incentive for the city council to seek for ways of reducing the city's unemployment problems. One idea was that of building a road bridge across the Tay to encourage better connections with central Scotland.Footnote 84 Another was to encourage new industries to come to Dundee by extolling the city's virtues, notably in a (jute-bound) book published in 1931 entitled ‘Do it in Dundee’. This was produced by a newly created economic development committee of the council.Footnote 85 The initiative on petitioning the London government for protection for jute can be seen as another arm of the same strategy.
On the local union side, it should be noted that the jute unions, and especially the biggest union, the DDUJFW, had long been set somewhat apart from much of the city's labour movement, which was dominated by male unions in shipbuilding, engineering, and the railways.Footnote 86 Indicative of this was the persistent denial of Communists any role as union officials in the DDUJFW, at a time when the CP had very much become a ‘mainstream’ part of the city's labour movement.Footnote 87 These arguments within the jute union were especially intense in 1937, though it is impossible to say whether this reflected the union's support for the ‘class-collaboration’ version of the United Front.Footnote 88 Part of this separateness can plausibly be ascribed to gender differences, given the DDUJFW's predominantly female membership. Direct evidence on the culture of the local Labour party is absent, but we know that the local CP was deeply riven, largely on gender lines.Footnote 89
Linking these two elements was the great shift in the role of the state from before 1914 to the interwar period. Reflecting trends across the whole of Britain, the state now mattered to the lives of jute workers in a way which had not been true before the war. While hostility to local state action in housing and unemployment relief was widespread, the response to this was not to attack state action per se, but to attempt to wrest political control of the state. Similarly, at the level of the central state, the wage council, however much its decisions on wage cuts in the early 1920 were bitterly resented, was not treated as a body to be got rid of. The jute union never believed that ‘free collective bargaining’ was likely to yield a superior outcome for jute workers. It is also worth stressing that after 1923 the jute employers stopped focusing on wage cuts as the main route to improving the industry's performance, and this may have helped focus attention away from the conflictual issue of the distribution of the industry's revenues on to the more unifying issues of protecting the industry's markets.
Of course, the rallying of the jute unions to protection did not mean the abandonment of the idea that in the long run the most advantageous prospect for Dundee was better wages and conditions in Calcutta. As noted above, Sime had focused much attention on this with his trip to Calcutta in the mid-1920s, and he continued to refer to it as the best hope even while negotiating the ‘United Front’ in the 1930s.Footnote 90 But this had a sense of paying obeisance to traditional gods, while focusing practical action on the protectionist idea.
Conversely, for the other United Front, the official combination of the Labour and Communist parties, this belief in improvement in Indian workers’ conditions as the best route to Dundee's revival remained central. In this. they, ironically, continued the tradition of pre-1914 liberalism in Dundee, which had also looked to improvements in Calcutta conditions to improve Dundee's competitive position as an alternative to protection.
The only detailed analysis we have of the Dundee CP in the 1930s suggests that its ‘abstract internationalism’ caused major problems for its membership, grappling with extraordinary levels of joblessness. Tolland has argued that the latter factor led to a major battle within the party on the issue of how far efforts should focus on wage issues, and how far on the conditions of the unemployed. This issue divided the party's women members, and led to the expulsion of the most prominent of these.Footnote 91 This can be seen as a reflection of the tensions in Dundee's labour movement in the 1930s which in part mirrored the divergent politics of the two United Fronts. Seeking immediate, if ideologically uncongenial, remedies for unemployment by tariffs can be seen as parallel to seeking to orient Communist activity away from the class struggle in industry towards defence of the conditions of the unemployed.
V
If we return to the two frameworks set out in the introduction, some broad conclusions can be drawn. Before the 1930s, no ‘distributional coalition’ or ‘producers’ alliance’ advocating protection emerged between workers and employers in the Dundee jute industry. The Liberal and Labour campaigns, and the outcome of both the 1906 and 1908 elections, suggest that the long-run benefits for food prices of free trade were widely appreciated in the pre-war city (though, of course, these prices had stopped falling from the mid-1890s).Footnote 92 But, as producers, many of Dundee's workers were increasingly adversely affected by international competition from the 1880s, and disastrously so in the 1930s. Given the absence of alternative employment opportunities locally, and the absence of easy movement to alternative labour markets, the adherence to free trade is particularly in need of explanation. No simple economic calculus of costs and benefits seems entirely adequate to the task, though the intensity of the pressures on the local labour market in the 1930s can help us explain the ‘United Front’ which did emerge in support of protectionism.
The second framework to be returned to sees responses to globalization amongst workers’ organizations as linked to the respective appeals of ‘statist’, ‘economistic’, and ‘mutualist’ responses to insecurity. Before 1914, ‘statist’ enthusiasm on the Left was extremely muted, and many Dundee workers looked to ‘mutualist’ and ‘economistic’ solutions as superior alternatives. However, these latter two responses were more difficult for the largely female and poorly organized jute workforce even before 1914, so that we can suggest that the institutional underpinnings for resisting the claims of protectionism were weaker in Dundee's core industry than in better-organized but much smaller sectors of the local economy.
As Harris has emphasized, the Great War had an ambiguous impact on Labour views of the state. On the one hand, wartime labour conflicts and post-war budget cuts reinforced the notion of the state as enemy of the workers. On the other hand, the large-scale experiments in state control in many areas of economic and social policy ‘were gradually to transform Labour's expectations about what could be done by a dynamic central government (even among those members of the party most convinced that the state was the tool of a repressive class power).’Footnote 93 This seems the most useful context in which to place what happened in interwar Dundee. Other factors, such as the political disorientation caused by Labour's national collapse in 1931, and the sharp deterioration in the circumstances of the city, mattered. But across much of the Left it was the acceptance of the efficacy of state action that is most striking in the long run.
Strikingly, this national trajectory coincided with a marked acceleration in the shift on the Conservative side against economic liberalism, so that increasingly, ideologically, the liberals in all parties were marginalized. For official Labour the trend is best known in leading to the embrace of strong notions of state ownership and planning, the hallmarks of Labour's economic and social policy in the 1930s.Footnote 94 Labour's arguments in that decade combined this emphasis with a continuing ideological distaste for protectionism, though in practice this was muted as the slump hardly seemed a propitious time for campaigning vigorously against the National government's tariffs.
The position of a local Labour leader like Sime mirrored this ambiguity. Formally, he held to an anti-protectionist ideology, and saw raising Indian wages as the only long-term solution to Dundee jute's problems; but in the circumstances of the 1930s he was willing to sacrifice this argument for the ‘short-term’ benefits of protection.Footnote 95
For the national leaders of the two major parties of the Left, the official ideology remained resolutely opposed to national protectionism, however much their rhetoric inveighed against aspects of international capitalism. But such positions were increasingly at odds with notions of national planning and national ownership. In the 1930s, this conflict, between a key commitment to regulating and managing the national economy (especially to achieve full employment), and a distaste for traditional protectionism, was resolved, at least verbally, by increasing talk about ‘planned trade’. But the substantive issue of reconciling domestic economic prosperity with recognition of Britain's reliance on international markets was only to be seriously addressed in the much changed circumstances of the Second World War and its aftermath.Footnote 96
The final question to be addressed is the significance of the imperial dimension for Dundee's response to globalization. Of course, the failed outcome of the ‘United Front's’ battle for protection was determined by imperial politics; the desire to contain Indian nationalism outweighed the pain inflicted on the domestic jute industry. As noted above, participants in the battle were well aware that they were being sacrificed to London's view of the larger imperial interest. But in terms of the complex politics of the 1930s, resulting in the formation of the two ‘United Fronts’, it seems the imperial dimension was rather marginal. The Left's official adherence to anti-protectionism was not the result of imperial considerations, but of an ‘abstract internationalism’ that transcended all political boundaries. Likewise, the ‘United Front’ in favour of protection drew on a desperate hope that national state action might rescue their industry from disaster, rather than on any belief that the empire could provide a framework for assisting them.Footnote 97
