A cakewalk between Asansol and Dundee: Material manifestations of a colonial thirdspace in a Bengali industrial town

This chapter should be a “cake walk” – at least, it began with one. It turns that imperial gaze backwards, in reflection, to Scotland itself, an entity quite distinct from ‘Britain’ both then and now, to consider how, through the stories of the people who built Asansol and cooked its cakes, Scotland might itself be understood as both colony and coloniser at the same time – a Thirdspace of a different sort. By the late seventeenth century, globalising theories and patterns of urbanism had emerged, consolidated around the so-called ‘Grand Modell’ of town planning that established characteristic features of British colonial settlement throughout the world. Indeed, Dundee cake was first put into mass production in the nineteenth century by Keiller’s, a company whose main concern was the manufacture of Marmalade – a British way of preserving Seville oranges that were grown thousands of miles south in Spain, and shipped north unripe– as a bitter breakfast jam.