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The Strange Death of the British Motor Cycle Industry. By Steve Koerner. Lancaster, UK: Carnegie Publishing, 2012. Pp. xviii+350. £15.
The author is an enthusiastic British Columbian rider of Norton motorcy- cles (a rough American English "translation" would be Harley-Davidson), and he scatters photographs of these and other iconic machines about his text. Readers should suppress any latent prejudice, however: Steve Koerner is a well-trained and effective historian and his judgments are copiously and professionally end-noted. He describes a British motorcycle industry which dominated world production by the mid-twentieth century, only to be virtually wiped out by Japanese competition, especially from Honda, in the 1960s. His central argument is that government policy or labor mili- tancy had little to do with this strange and rapid decline and that the roots of later failure can be found in strategic stances developed in the face of modest German and Italian competition during Britain's global domi- nance. These included overemphasis on powerful models...