Dundee and the Empire

de Jim Tomlinson

This new 'global' history of Dundee in the late 19th and early 20th centuries focuses on the question 'How did the people of Dundee respond to the challenge of being the most economically globalised city in the world in the years before the First World War?' It shows how the answer is complicated by the fact that Dundee's jute industry was competing with Calcutta's. It describes how 'Juteopolis' had to cope not only with low-wage foreign competition, but also with the political reality that fate of the British Empire in India was far more important than the economic well-being of a small Scottish city.