Industrial Revolution (early) · 1811–1813
Mechanical Looms & Industrial Machines
Job Displacement and Dehumanization
At the start of the Industrial Revolution, English textile workers known as the Luddites revolted against the automated looms and knitting frames that were undercutting their livelihoods. From 1811 to 1813 (with sporadic attacks running on to 1816), three distinct regional movements took part. Nottinghamshire framework-knitters, who operated hand-powered knitting machines to make stockings and other hosiery. Yorkshire croppers, skilled finishers who used heavy hand shears to raise and trim the nap on woven cloth, a job now being done, badly at first, by mechanical "shearing frames." And Lancashire cotton-weavers, whose hand looms were being displaced by factory power looms.
They rallied under the name of Ned Ludd (possibly apocryphal, in any case a threat to no one) and went at the new machines with hammers. Their specific grievance: manufacturers were using the machinery in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to dodge established labour agreements and wage rates. Skills that took years to learn were being flattened overnight. The panic was so intense that the British government sent more than 12,000 troops to the affected counties — more than Wellington then commanded in Spain — and passed the Frame-Breaking Act (1812), which made machine-breaking a hanging offence. Lord Byron opposed it in his maiden speech in the House of Lords.
The word Luddite has since slid into meaning anyone afraid of new technology. Historians including E. P. Thompson, Kirkpatrick Sale and Kevin Binfield have pushed back hard on that caricature. The original Luddites opposed the exploitative deployment of machinery, not machinery itself. The real question they raised — who should benefit when productivity jumps — is one industrial societies have been re-answering ever since.
They rallied under the name of Ned Ludd (possibly apocryphal, in any case a threat to no one) and went at the new machines with hammers. Their specific grievance: manufacturers were using the machinery in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to dodge established labour agreements and wage rates. Skills that took years to learn were being flattened overnight. The panic was so intense that the British government sent more than 12,000 troops to the affected counties — more than Wellington then commanded in Spain — and passed the Frame-Breaking Act (1812), which made machine-breaking a hanging offence. Lord Byron opposed it in his maiden speech in the House of Lords.
The word Luddite has since slid into meaning anyone afraid of new technology. Historians including E. P. Thompson, Kirkpatrick Sale and Kevin Binfield have pushed back hard on that caricature. The original Luddites opposed the exploitative deployment of machinery, not machinery itself. The real question they raised — who should benefit when productivity jumps — is one industrial societies have been re-answering ever since.