Jute, like Britain’s other staple industries, suffered a long decline across the twentieth century. Unlike the cotton, coal, or shipbuilding industries, jute was densely concentrated in one city, Dundee, and thus provides the authors of this monograph with a manageable case study of industrial change. The book is introduced as an assault on “declinism.” The authors reject the idea that economic decline was “part of a national pathology,” instead seeing it “as part of the recurrent history of capitalist market economies, constantly re-shaped by new patterns of demand, competition, and shifts in production technologies” (4). Jute is described as a “pioneer of decline” (10), an industry that successfully responded to increasingly adverse conditions and that failed in Britain through, the authors maintain, no fault of its own.

The first two chapters outline the history of jute, showing how jute was “de-globalized” in Britain as Dundee gradually gained its preeminent role in global markets and subsequently struggled to retain domestic market share in the face of foreign competition. Following chapters deal thematically with the industry’s workforce, the industry’s attempts to control markets and manage decline, the industry’s relationship with government, and the fate of Dundee itself. The city features prominently in most chapters, and the book is as much about Dundee’s struggle with deindustrialization and unemployment as it is about jute. Many pages are dedicated to new industries that emerged in Dundee, relevant to the story only so far as these firms drew from jute’s labor pool.

Across the book, the authors show how jute firms “embraced strategies of both political campaigning and economic ‘modernization.’” “In the long run,” they argue, “neither of these strategies could avert decline.” Yet the authors try to prove that “in the short and medium term they achieved a measure of success” (34). Success is unfortunately not defined. Readers will see how jute firms maximized profits, but the most successful firms abandoned jute altogether, diversifying into new products and services. When real innovation appears, such as the development of polypropylene or the use of jute backing in tufted carpeting, the source of change appears to be exogenous to the industry. Jute firms did succeed in sustaining some level of employment in Dundee, but the authors do not question whether this labor could have been more profitably employed in other work.

The long survival of jute firms, the authors argue, was predicated on “the ability of the industry to successfully regulate market conditions” (65). This is a far cry from the initial claim that jute firms successfully managed decline: they survived because of protectionism, collusion, and price-fixing, and the authors leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether Dundee or Britain saw a net gain from keeping this nineteenth-century industry alive until 1999.

Some themes of the book will be of interest to specialist readers: a great deal of information about Dundee and its relationship with the national government is presented, and the authors give a good analysis of the “gendered character of the industry’s labour force” (6). Women, who constituted three-quarters of the jute labor force in the early twentieth century, suffered disproportionately from jute’s decline. The evidence shows that trade unions protected men’s jobs, at the expense of women. Interestingly, the authors show that women’s earnings actually improved as their share of employment in jute declined. Government took an evenhanded view of the jute labor force and did not discount “the significance of unemployment in jute because it included a significant number of women” (132).

Unfortunately the thematic, rather than chronological, organization of the book creates problems for the reader. One example is the frequent discussion of the government’s Jute Control Board, which played a decisive role in extending and then retracting protection for British jute. The board’s decisions clearly shaped the economic fortunes of Dundee and the business decisions of jute firms, topics discussed throughout chapters 2–5. The story of Jute Control’s creation and the politics surrounding it are not discussed in depth until chapter 6, however, leaving the reader with the task of drawing out the cumulative impact of government policy on jute firms (and vice versa).

Organization and argument aside, the book shows signs of careless editing. Minor offenses include an incorrect chapter heading (chap. 4) and several undefined acronyms (a list of abbreviations in the front matter is woefully incomplete). More troubling, the text is replete with typos, missing apostrophes, and unwieldy sentences. There are ample data here on Dundee and its jute firms and workers to reward specialist readers, but a general audience will be disappointed with the refutation of “declinism” promised by the authors.