A British Company in British India before 1945: The Case of J. & P. Coats (2012)

This paper attempted to construct a general true picture of how J. & P. Coats, the British leading multinational enterprise manufacturing cotton thread, did business in British India before 1945. From the late 19th century, J. & P. Coats had exported, through its British selling arm, the Central Agency Ltd., its products to some 19 countries and regions, from Near East to Far East, throughout Asia: Turkey, Arabia, Syria, Persia, British India, Burma, Ceylon, Cochin China, Dutch Indies, Siam, Straits Settlements, British Borneo, Dutch Indies Borneo, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, China, Japan and Korea. British India was the fourth largest market, following Australia, Chinaand Japan, for British-made Coats’s thread until 1908. However, in 1909, the export to British India surpassed that to Japan, where Coats’s thread began to be locally produced in 1907, and, in 1916, had once surpassed that to China. The export to British India reached a first peak in 1920 and, after a period of fluctuation, a second peak in 1925, having gradually decreasing in the second half of the 1920s. A first foreign direct investment by J. & P. Coats in Asia was implemented in Japan in 1907 and, by 1942, a total of 10 investments, for both sale and manufacture, occurred for the six Asian markets - Japan (3 investments), Manchukuo (1), Korea (1), Australia (1), China (1), and British India (3). By the first half of the 1930s, the British Indian market had been served by J. & P. Coats from three bases, Delhi in the north, Bombay in the west, and Calcutta in the east, which were locally supervised by British employees of the Central Agency Limited, the British selling subsidiary of J. & P. Coats. In the second half of the 1930s, the market of British India appears to have become more and more competitive and, thus, in late 1937, it was decided to set up a small factory in Delhi on the Indian model to undertake winding, ticketing etc. of twisted thread imported from Britain. By the middle of 1938, the factory, known as first the Ball Sewings Factory and then Jumna Thread Mill, had been completed and duly in operation. And, in early 1942, two important developments took place. First, it was decided to install in Bombay a plant to produce tube requirements for all India and the new plant was to be run on the lines of Jumna Thread Mill in Delhi. And, second, more importantly, it was decided to form a company, to be known as Jumna Thread Mills Limited, to handle all goods of local production. The company was to operate for its own account, while its production was to be sold by the Central Agency Limited. The authorized capital was to be 2 million Rupees, of which one fourths, 0.5 million Rupees, would be issued. This paper attempted, for the first time on the basis of the company’s internal materials, to reveal the ways in which J. & P. Coats, the leading British multinational enterprise, did business in India. Also, the paper appears to be a first detailed case study of ‘British multinational enterprises in India before 1945’. To that extent, this paper will, it is hoped, contribute to the two related studies of J. & P. Coats on one hand and the British multinational enterprises on the other before 1945. More detailed analysis is required with regard to J. & P. Coats in not only British India but also the three other countries, Australia, China, and Japan together with its colonies, Manchukuo and Korea. Then, the case studies of the individual countries could naturally lead to a more satisfactory and concrete picture of J. & P. Coats’s involvement in the Asian markets. This paper was a preliminary analysis of the subject and will be surely revised and enlarged to address more fully the origins, performance and management of ‘J. & P. Coats both in British India and in Asia before 1945’.