Poverty and Labour in the Jute Industry: Home and Away
At the height of the jute industry both Dundee and Bengal were extremely influential and rich. However, there was still large amounts of poverty in both areas and my project will focus on why this happened. I will specifically concentrate on labour history in the jute industry in both places to try to understand the degree of poverty and what contributed to this. Although, there are many other connections such as the movement of people, machinery and jute, my project will be a comparative one, which will compare both the Dundee and Bengal jute industries. This will help to recognize power structures and capitalism within the factories and mills.
The comparisons that I will concentrate on will focus on the similarities and differences between Dundee and Bengal, and in particular the labour workforce in the industry. In combination I believe these comparisons will help me to understand why this happened and ultimately answer my questions. I will focus my project on three main areas, firstly, will be migration of the workforce into these areas, as at the height of the jute production there was a shortage of labour. Secondly, I will go into the working and living conditions of the men, women and children who worked in the mills. Thirdly, I will focus specifically on living costs and wages in both areas. These three main areas will cut across boundaries such as gender, class and culture and should give a fuller understanding to the large amount of poverty that were in both Dundee and Bengal.
There is a large amount of literature on the Dundee jute industry and the same with Bengal. However, there is not much in the way of comparative studies between them, this I feel gives me a gap which I can try to fill through my own research. Both primary and secondary sources will be imperative to this investigation. In primary sources I have already found and will continue to look for statistical information, including population and migration figures; numbers and gender of workers in factories and I will also look into wages and living costs. I will also use maps to give a more visual component to the project. Due to the availability of these sources, it will be very hard to get everything I need; however, I have also found some of these within secondary sources that I will try to use to fill in the gaps.
There is a large amount of secondary sources that I will be using including literature for Dundee from Jim Tomlinson, who has many titles that encompass the jute industry. Eleanor Gordon, who focuses on women and the labour movement in different areas of Scotland including Dundee. Emma M. Wainwright concentrates specifically on the Dundee jute mills as spaces of production, surveillance and discipline. Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities edited by Bob Harris, Louise Miskell and Christopher A. Watley also gives comprehensive guide into migration and also the jute mill and flax mills in Dundee. Literature for Bengal that I have been reading are Samita Sen’s Women and Labour in the Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry, to help me understand women’s position in the jute industry. Tara Sethia, who looks at the rise of jute manufacturing in both Dundee and Bengal. Other authors include P. Bharadwaj who discusses partition and migration in his work and Dipesh Chakrabarty who focuses primarily on the working classes.
All of these together should give a comprehensive knowledge of the similarities and differences between Dundee and Bengal. This will in turn, give me the answers to my original question of why there was large amounts of poverty at the height of the jute industry in both places?