Jute and empire

Jute and empire PDF Author: Gordon T Stewart
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526121484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Dundee had an interesting role to play in the jute trade, but the main player in the story of jute was Calcutta. This book follows the relationship of jute to empire, and discusses the rivalry between the Scottish and Indian cities from the 1840s to the 1950s and reveals the architecture of jute's place in the British Empire. The book adopts significant fresh approaches to imperial history, and explores the economic and cultural landscapes of the British Empire. Jute had been grown, spun and woven in Bengal for centuries before it made its appearance as a factory-manufactured product in world markets in the late 1830s. The book discusses the profits made in Calcutta during the rise of jute between the 1880s and 1920s; the profits reached extraordinary levels during and after World War I. The Calcutta jute industry entered a crisis period even before it was pummelled by the depression of the 1930s. The looming crisis stemmed from the potential of the Calcutta mills to outproduce world demand many times over. The St Andrew's Day rituals in Calcutta, begun three years before the founding of the Indian Jute Mills Association. The ceremonial occasion helps the reader to understand what the jute wallahs meant when they said they were in Calcutta for 'the greater glory of Scotland'. The book sheds some light on the contentious issues surrounding the problematic, if ever-intriguing, phenomenon of British Empire. The jute wallahs were inextricably bound up in the cultural self-images generated by British imperial ideology.

Jute and empire

Jute and empire PDF Author: Gordon T Stewart
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526121484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
Dundee had an interesting role to play in the jute trade, but the main player in the story of jute was Calcutta. This book follows the relationship of jute to empire, and discusses the rivalry between the Scottish and Indian cities from the 1840s to the 1950s and reveals the architecture of jute's place in the British Empire. The book adopts significant fresh approaches to imperial history, and explores the economic and cultural landscapes of the British Empire. Jute had been grown, spun and woven in Bengal for centuries before it made its appearance as a factory-manufactured product in world markets in the late 1830s. The book discusses the profits made in Calcutta during the rise of jute between the 1880s and 1920s; the profits reached extraordinary levels during and after World War I. The Calcutta jute industry entered a crisis period even before it was pummelled by the depression of the 1930s. The looming crisis stemmed from the potential of the Calcutta mills to outproduce world demand many times over. The St Andrew's Day rituals in Calcutta, begun three years before the founding of the Indian Jute Mills Association. The ceremonial occasion helps the reader to understand what the jute wallahs meant when they said they were in Calcutta for 'the greater glory of Scotland'. The book sheds some light on the contentious issues surrounding the problematic, if ever-intriguing, phenomenon of British Empire. The jute wallahs were inextricably bound up in the cultural self-images generated by British imperial ideology.

Jute and Empire

Jute and Empire PDF Author: Gordon Thomas Stewart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526121493
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This magnificent book combines cultural, social, economic and political history in a quite remarkable way. Based on fascinating primary research in India, England and Scotland, it represents a new departure in the writing of imperial history. 'Jute and Empire' follows the intriguing story of the rivalry between Calcutta and Dundee from the 1830s to the 1950s as these two cities competed in the world jute trade. It uses this dramatic narrative to explore fresh ways of understanding the multi-faceted nature of the British Empire. Recent scholarship on British imperialism has been divided between economic analysis and cultural readings. 'Jute and Empire' pursues both strategies by integrating economic, political, social and cultural history in an ambitious effort to understand, through the window provided by jute, the interaction of Bengal and Scotland within the broader context of the British raj.

Empire, Industry and Class

Empire, Industry and Class PDF Author: Anthony Cox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415506166
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Presenting a new approach towards the social history of working classes in the imperial context, this book looks at the formation of working classes in Scotland and Bengal. It analyses the trajectory of labour market formation, labour supervision, cultures of labour and class formation between two regional economies - one in an imperial country and the other in a colonial one. The book examines the everyday lives of the jute workers of the imperial nexus, and the impact of the 'Dundee School' of Scottish mechanics, engineers and managers who ran the Calcutta jute industry. It goes on to challenge existing theories of imperialism, class formation and class struggle - particularly those that underline the exceptional nature of the Indian experience of industrialization - and demonstrates how and why Empire was able to provide an opportunity to test and perfect ways of controlling the lower classes of Dundee. These historical debates have a continued relevance as we observe the impact of globalization and rapid industrialization in the so-called developing world and the accompanying changes in many areas of the developed world marked by de-industrialization. The book is of use to scholars of imperial history, labour history, British history and South Asian history.

Dundee and the Empire

Dundee and the Empire PDF Author: Jim Tomlinson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748686150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This is a new OCyglobalOCO history of the Scottish city of DundeeOCOs industrial era which combines economic, political and social history and explores the significance of empire for British policy."e;

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta PDF Author: Debjani Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108681727
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.

Dundee, jute and empire

Dundee, jute and empire PDF Author: The Open University
Publisher: The Open University
ISBN: 147300926X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Using Dundee in Scotland as a case study, this 12-hour free course explored some of the debates surrounding the economics of British imperialism.

A Local History of Global Capital

A Local History of Global Capital PDF Author: Tariq Omar Ali
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202575
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital. Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

Imperialism

Imperialism PDF Author: John Atkinson Hobson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description


The Empire Strikes Back?

The Empire Strikes Back? PDF Author: Andrew S. Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317873882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
`The Empire Strikes Back' will inject the empire back into the domestic history of modern Britain. In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century, Britain's empire was so large that it was truly the global superpower. Much of Africa, Asia and America had been subsumed. Britannia's tentacles had stretched both wide and deep. Culture, Religion, Health, Sexuality, Law and Order were all impacted in the dominated countries. `The Empire Strikes Back' shows how the dependent states were subsumed and then hit back, affecting in turn England itself.

Entrepreneurship in the Age of Empire

Entrepreneurship in the Age of Empire PDF Author: Sarah Dietz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000299619
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Exploring the interplay of politics and commerce in one of the most dynamic periods of British history, this book traces the fortunes of the India and Eastern Trading Company Limited, established in 1906 to finance a jute plantation in Assam, north-east India. In a watershed period for commercial culture, as family capitalism and industrial economics gave way to a predominance of speculative investment and the marketing of ideas, analysis of this London-registered company and its international management forms a lens through which to view the broader socio-political and economic environment of the late-Victorian period to the interwar. Mapping the eclectic bonds that created a network of association between a multinational cast of merchants, company promoters, mining engineers, politicians and industrialists, reveals the multiplicity of strands which coalesced to create one share company. By examining their responses to the opportunities created by colonialism: to enabling legislations and set-backs, to competition and collaboration, internationalism versus rising nationalism, an important era in British history is examined from an entirely fresh perspective. The history of the India and Eastern Trading Company Limited is a tale of cloaked agendas, of land speculation under the guise of colonial agriculture, of German and Russian interests embedded in British-empire prospects, which exposes the intrigues of some of the most infamous imperialists of the era; figures who were the subject of intense academic scrutiny throughout the twentieth century and remain at the forefront of impassioned debate in the twenty first.