History of Dundee - Modern Era

Modern Era

Dundee greatly expanded in size during the Industrial Revolution mainly because of the burgeoning British Empire trade, flax and then latterly the jute industry. By the end of the 19th century, a majority of the city's workers were employed in its many jute mills and in related industries. Dundee's location on a major estuary allowed for the easy importation of jute from the Indian subcontinent as well as whale oil—needed for the processing of the jute—from the city's large whaling industry. A substantial coastal marine trade also developed, with inshore shipping working between the city of Dundee and the port of London. The industry began to decline in the 20th century as it became cheaper to process the cloth on the Indian subcontinent. The city's last jute mill closed in the 1970s.

In addition to jute the city is also known for jam and journalism. The "jam" association refers to marmalade, which was purportedly invented in the city by Janet Keiller in 1797 (although in reality, recipes for marmalade have been found dating back to the 16th century). Keiller's marmalade became a famous brand because of its mass production and its worldwide export. The industry was never a major employer compared with the jute trade. Marmalade has since become the "preserve" of larger businesses, but jars of Keiller's marmalade are still widely available. "Journalism" refers to the publishing firm DC Thomson & Co., which was founded in the city in 1905 and remains the largest employer after the health and leisure industries. The firm publishes a variety of newspapers, children's comics and magazines, including The Sunday Post, The Courier, Shout and children's publications, The Beano and The Dandy.

Dundee also developed a major maritime and shipbuilding industry in the 19th century. 2,000 ships were built in Dundee between 1871 and 1881, including the Antarctic research ship used by Robert Falcon Scott, the RRS Discovery. This ship is now on display at Discovery Point in the city, and the Victorian steel-framed works in which Discovery's engine was built is now home to the city's largest book shop. The need of the local jute industry for whale oil also supported a large whaling industry. Dundee Island in the Antarctic takes its name from the Dundee whaling expedition, which discovered it in 1892. Whaling ceased in 1912 and shipbuilding ceased in 1981. The last connection with whaling in Dundee reportedly ended in 1922 when a trading ketch owned by Robert Kinnes & Sons, which had been first set up as a trading company for the Tay Whale Fishing Company, was lost in the Cumberland Sound.

The Tay estuary was the location of the first Tay rail bridge, built by Thomas Bouch and completed in 1877. At the time it was the longest railway bridge in the world. The bridge fell down in a storm less than a year later under the weight of a train full of passengers in what is known as the Tay Bridge disaster. None of the passengers survived.

Tomlinson et al. argue that Dundee enjoyed a "Golden Age" in the 1950s and 1960s. The collapse of the jute industry, they argue, was well handled for three reasons. First, the jute industry was protected from cheap imports by the state. Tariffs and quotas were not allowed by the GATT agreements. Instead protection came through the continuation from 1945 into the 1970s of the wartime Jute Control system, by which the Ministry of Materials imported jute goods and sold them at an artificial price related to the cost of manufacture in Dundee. Secondly, the jute firms agreed to company consolidation to make themselves more efficient, to increase labor productivity, and to cooperate in developing new fibers and goods. Third, labour unions and management ended the hard feelings that caused so much labour unrest and had come to a head in the dismal decade of unemployment in the 1930s. In the postwar cooperation, employers, unions and the city spoke with one voice. Success in managing jute's decline, and the brief brief of multinational corporations like NCR and Timex, held off decline and there was relative full employment in the city down to the 1970s. The golden age ended in the 1980s as the multinationals found cheaper labour in Bangladesh, India, and South America, and the Thatcher government ended state support for British industry. By the 1990s jute had disappeared from Dundee.