Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 38 on 11/04/2008.

This article is 7 months old and some information provided may be time sensitive. Please check all details of events, tours, opening times and other information before travelling or making arrangements.

Jute City

Scotland's fourth city was built largely on the Jute industry, a natural fibre also known as hessian or burlap. Gavin D Smith reports.

Last year Dundee launched an initiative to become the first ‘plastic bag-free’ city in Scotland, with the council and local retailers handing out thousands of reusable carriers made from jute, imported from India. Until the low wage economies of the Indian sub-continent brought about its ultimate demise, Dundee was the world capital of jute manufacture for the best part of a century, and the irony of the situation was not lost on Dundonians.

It is fair to say that the Victorian economy of Scotland’s fourth city was built largely on the jute industry, which had its origins in an 1820 shipment of 20 bales of the fibre which were landed at Dundee docks from India for processing. Between 1841 and 1901 the population of Dundee tripled from 45,000 to 161,000, principally due to the employment afforded by the burgeoning jute trade, and in 1883 more than one million bales of raw jute were unloaded in Dundee. By the turn of the century in excess of 50,000 people worked in more than 100 mills, and Dundee was popularly referred to as ‘Juteopolis.’ During the first half of the 19th century Dundee was well placed to become the jute capital of the world because it already boasted a long-established textile industry, with an infrastructure that could be adapted and a workforce that could be retrained to handle the newly-imported commodity. The bundles of hard, compressed jute that arrived in Dundee docks required softening with whale oil as part of their conversion into useable fabric and .....

To read the rest of this article you can buy this issue or subscribe to Scotland Magazine to have every issue delivered direct to your door.

By Gavin D. Smith

Section : Scotland Heritage

Page number : 68