Dundee’s Jute mills and factories: Spaces of production, surveillance and discipline

Abstract

Taking Dundee’s jute industry as its focus, this paper provides a geographical reading of the architectural form, design and layout of the mills and factories of the late nineteenth century. By tracking the change from the multi-storey to the shed system, it emphasises the importance of the internal geographies of the production process. And drawing upon Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, notably his rule of functional sites and techniques of enclosure and partitioning, together with his tentative references to the factory system, I show how the external architecture and internal space of the mills and factories were used to create an ordered geography of both people and machinery and help maintain a gendered labour hierarchy. With the industry’s largely female workforce channelled through points of visibility, a preliminary investigation is made into the matrix of knowledge, spanning the entire works, that ensured all space and all those within it, could be accounted for.