East India Company The
British East India Company was the British Empire Authority delegated in Bengal from the 17th century until dissolved in 1857. The Dutch and the French were the first jute traders. The company began exporting gunny sacks to South East Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In the 1830s Thomas Neigh imported jute to Dundee and experimented using flax spinning machines to make cloth. This was not initially successful, but used as a small mixture with flax until they discovered that whale oil made it soft enough to be spun. Demand for jute skyrocketed as its use in sacks, ropes, and cloth displaced flax. Between 1833 and 1855, Bengal saw a boom in growing jute, but a decline in its cottage hand spinning. In 1855 George
Acland was financed by Bysamber Sen to import Dundee fabric spinning machinery (and whale oil) to start the first factory in India at Serampore. Although a failure, he inspired the
Borneo Company to start a steam-powered weaving and spinning mill in 1857, and soon a dozen companies began production for domestic Indian use and export to the east. By 1908 Calcutta was the world's largest jute producer, having defeated Dundee. From the 1890s the Marwaris had entered the market as brokers (like the Birla group) and became the dominant owners of an industry employing over 300,000 workers.
Bangladeshi jute traders Being a major player in the long history of jute trade and having finest natural fibre, Bangladesh has always had an advantage in raw jute trading. Bangladesh is still the largest producer and exporter of raw jute in the world. After the separation of Bangladesh (East Pakistan) with the breakup of British created East and West Pakistan (styled itself Pakistan) in 1971, the jute trading was not limited to specific groups in South Asia. After the independence of Bangladesh, most privately owned jute mills were nationalised under the socialist policies of the
Awami League government. Later, to control these jute mils in Bangladesh, the government built up
Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC). No other jute mills were allowed to grow in the private sector before 1975. After
Ziaur Rahman became Bangladesh president a new age dawned upon the Bangladesh jute industry. This incident grew many raw jute traders from different corners of Bangladesh who used to supply raw jute to BJMC owned jute mills. This group of traders are called
Beparis, who buy raw jute directly from the farmers. Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC), a
public corporation in Bangladesh, is the largest state owned manufacturing and exporting organisation in the world in the jute sector. BJMC owns and operates a number of jute mills around Bangladesh:
Dundee Jute The entrepreneurs of the
Dundee jute industry in Scotland were called
the Jute Barons. in
Dundee,
Camperdown Works, designed by
George Addison Cox with James MacLaren, built 1865-6, visible on the city’s skyline. Dundee was a centre of flax spinning and the whale oil industry. They realised that jute could be mechanically spun if whale oil was added. They created a huge new industry making bags for the transport of goods like coffee and as sandbags. By the later nineteenth century, as part of the wider
Industrial Revolution in Scotland, Dundee had become the principal centre of jute manufacture within the British Empire and one of the largest producers worldwide, with production, shipping, engineering and finance closely interconnected within the city’s economy. Among the largest of the city’s jute manufacturing complexes was
Camperdown Works in Dundee, developed from 1850 by the firm of Cox Brothers to the engineering design of
George Addison Cox; by the late nineteenth century it had become the largest jute works in the world and its great chimney, Cox’s Stack, completed in 1866,, is now a Category A listed building, a monument of the city’s jute industry and a prominent symbol of Dundee’s past industrial landscape. The Dundee jute industry started to decline when the machinery manufacturers sold the machinery to Indian merchants who benefitted from easier access to raw materials and lower pay. This is a famous example of free trade in which the liberal government was elected to not enact trade barriers allowing the Calcutta industry to win. Given that the "Dundee Jute Barons" had ownership stakes in Calcutta and Dundee, the decline in Scotland was not so burdensome on them. Over 50% of the workers in Dundee were in Jute and two-thirds were women, much of the remainder were children because they could be paid less. The boom had led to slums, over crowding, poor working conditions and low pay.
Post-independence in India The Indian Jute Mills Association is the apex body controlling the Indian trade.
Birla is the most famous business giant in India which began as a Jute broker. The
Birla family is Marwari along with
Mittal and
Bajaj. Indian Jute is considered to be dominated by
Marwari. The industry has faced considerable trouble, for example, a mill owner was murdered by his workers in 2015 when he proposed cutting down hours. 6 such murders have occurred in recent years. The Jute Industry in India depends on government purchase. Since the millennium government procurement for mandatory packaging in jute has decreased and is only now being reversed - at the consumer level – by the plastic ban.
Pakistani Jute Traders Pre-1971 After independence from British colonial rule, East Bengal with possessing the finest jute fibre stock, lacked an effective industrialised jute manufacturing. Several groups of mainly Gujarati clans came into the jute industrialisation business by setting up several jute mills in
Chittagong,
Khulna,
Dhaka and
Narayanganj. Among these families, the most significant ones are: • The Bawanis • The Adamjees • The Ispahanis • The
Sattars • The Maniyas • The Khans ==See also==