In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dundee's fortunes were closely tied to one commodity: jute. Dundee's specialization in jute created strong connections to India, where practically all of the jute spun in Scotland was grown. In Dundee and the Empire, Jim Tomlinson explores the extent to which Dundee was shaped by its imperial ties. Tomlinson's book joins earlier work by Gordon Stewart and Anthony Cox by examining the ways in which jute created economic, political, cultural, and personal linkages between the Scottish city and the broader British Empire. While Stewart and Cox wrote histories of jute from a transnational perspective, however, Tomlinson explains that his book is squarely focused “on the Dundee end of this imperial connection” (3). The book is largely an economic and political history, though Tomlinson does address the arguments raised by proponents and opponents of the “new imperial history.” He writes, “in seeking to understand the relation between empire and popular culture we need to integrate the study of the material consequences of empire with the analysis of popular understandings of empire” (2). Though this important task is identified as “a central aim of this book,” Dundee and the Empire is fundamentally a book about imperial economic policy, rather than the lived experience of empire in a Scottish industrial city (2).

In the first half of the book Tomlinson focuses on the challenges and opportunities Dundee and its jute industry faced from 1850 onward, with the most attention paid to the two decades before 1914. Contrary to what his title might lead readers to expect, Tomlinson argues that globalization, rather than imperialism per se, was the most important process at work in Dundee. By the twentieth century, “Juteopolis” exported most of its jute goods to the United States and other countries outside the British Empire. Tomlinson shows that Dundee was also a major exporter of capital and emigrant labor to the empire as well as to the United States and other countries. Though migration to India for work in jute mills was “an important aspect of the city's experience of empire,” Tomlinson shows that the Dundee-Calcutta links highlighted by Stewart and Cox directly affected only a tiny portion of the city's population (28).

In the second part of the book Tomlinson examines the responses of workers and capitalists to growing competition in manufacturing from India and Europe. While British politics took a definite “imperial turn” after the First World War, Dundonians were largely unable to exploit the empire to their advantage. Dundee's customers in the Americas bought Dundee jute to package produce bound for Britain whether they were part of the empire or not. Before 1914, jute workers supported Free Trade candidates, wary of imperialists who promised protection for jute at the cost of the “dear loaf.”

When the jute industry finally joined the campaign for imperial protectionism in the 1930s, it unsuccessfully asked for help against another part of the empire: India. Though Dundee was an “imperial city,” Tomlinson concludes that costs of empire outweighed the benefits for Dundee. If the question of Dundee's total reliance on colonial India for its raw material is downplayed, he is probably right. He asserts that after the “genocidal process” of imperial conquest was completed, “the patterns of economic activity which developed … reflected market forces at work, rather than the direct exercise of imperial might” (24).

Tomlinson's treatment of the politics of empire in Dundee is convincing, but his coverage of the cultural aspects of empire is less satisfactory. He provides little evidence about Dundee's everyday experience of empire, despite his statement that “local resources for research on the city are especially rich” (165). Election results and a discussion of responses to the South African War serve as proxies for the sentiments of average people toward the empire. While Tomlinson writes that from the 1880s onward, “many Dundonians, including the organised working class, were talking about India and the Empire,” readers get little sense of what Dundonians of any class read, watched, heard, wore, ate, or drank that connected them (or not) to empire (161). He rejects Cox's argument that an imperial “nexus of knowledge and power” (39) influenced the way Dundee's jute capitalists viewed India, seeing nothing special in the way that Dundee's elites viewed India and the empire. Reports on Indian working conditions serve as the primary evidence for working-class views of India.

Tomlinson argues that capitalists and workers usually saw Indians as business rivals with differing labor costs rather than as threatening colonial “others.” Coalitions formed in Dundee around tangible issues like wages and working conditions, rather than racial categories. Like contemporary advocates of trade deals, many Dundonians argued that effective workplace regulations, unionization, and higher wages were better solutions to unfair “sweated” competition than tariffs or other protective measures. Overall, the book is useful as a study of the economic and political challenges facing Dundee between 1900 and 1939. Tomlinson's reminder that Dundee was a globalized city as much as it was an imperial city is salutary, as is the fact that imperial systems produced winners and losers in the metropole as well as in the periphery.