In 1919, Winston Churchill participated in a delegation on behalf of the Dundee jute industry to the Board of Trade, calling on the Board to do something about Indian competition. During the discussion he ‘emphasized the point that where competition was between peoples living under wholly different modes of life, Government would have to formulate principles of equity and economy for regulating such competition; these principles were not at present apparent to him’. This sense of the breadth and complexity of the problem thrown up by such competition, and the difficulties in formulating a response, provides the starting point for this chapter.

As previously emphasised, Juteopolis's connections with India were multiple and complex. But after the 1870s they were increasingly shaped by this problem of competition from Calcutta in markets for jute goods, competition which came to be seen to threaten the prosperity, and in some views the very survival, of the city's staple industry. This chapter focuses upon the response of the jute employers, and asks: how was this Indian competition understood in Dundee, and how did these understandings help shape the employer's responses? How effective were these responses?

Literature on the Raj has long recognised that British interactions with the sub-continent were shaped by diverse and changing ideas about the nature of Indian society. Such analysis has focused on trying to understand the ideas which informed the policies of the British. This has often led to a chronology which links British approaches to ruling India to underlying ideological transitions, for example the change from an eighteenth-century ‘orientalism’ to an early nineteenth-century utilitarianism, leading to a much greater willingness on the part of the British to ‘modernise’ Indian institutions. After the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 there was a reduced willingness to challenge Indian ‘traditions’, and this political stance was linked to analyses which often rested on highly problematic accounts of an essentialised, unchanging ‘Indianness’, linked to institutions such as castes.

The link between the kind of imperial ‘knowledges’ that Europeans developed and the imperial power they simultaneously exercised is, of course, at the core of modern understandings of orientalism, above all the work of Edward Said.