The Luddites Who Did Not Hate Machines

Between 1811 and 1816, bands of textile workers in the English Midlands and the north swore oaths, met on moors at night, and smashed the machines of their employers. They took their name from Ned Ludd, a figure who may never have lived. The word Luddite has since come to mean anyone who fears technology, and it is hurled at critics of every new invention.

Yet the original Luddites were skilled operators of the machinery they attacked. Their targets were selective, and historians have noted that they spared the machines of masters who paid fair prices and kept to the old customs. What they opposed was the use of wide frames and cheaper methods by employers who cut wages, hired unapprenticed labour and sold shoddy goods. The historian Eric Hobsbawm is credited with describing their actions as a kind of collective bargaining by riot.

The state responded fiercely. Parliament made frame breaking a capital offence in 1812, and at York in early 1813 a mass trial ended with several men being hanged. Whatever the Luddites believed, the law treated property as more precious than the livelihood of those who worked on it.

Whatever the Luddites believed, the law treated property as more precious than the livelihood of those who worked on it.

The modern use of the word therefore hides a harder question. If the Luddites were not against progress but against the terms on which it arrived, then their story is less about fear of technology than about who gains from it. That is a question every new machine raises again.