[December, 1997]
Machine-breaking holds something of a time-honoured position in pre and early-industrial England. Indeed, the physical destruction of private property in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a far from uncommon practice: disagreements between employer and employed frequently went hand-in-hand with not only the breaking of machines but attacks on stocks of raw materials and finished goods, as well as the wrecking of barns, mills, hayricks and the like—practices summarised by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘collective bargaining by riot’.[1] In a society in which manufacturing in the modern sense was still a nascent form, popular protest still bore superficial similarities to older and more traditional forms of agrarian protest such as the food riot and taxation populaire (popular price fixing). [2]
Dating back at least to the 1660s—when the Spitalfields silk weavers had rioted to smash the Dutch looms introduced by French ribbon-loom weavers—and continuing still to make a presence up until the 1830s, attacks upon machines have attracted particular historical attention. Often—and quite incorrectly—gathered collectively under the rubric of ‘Luddism’, such practices have gained a particular popular resonance, to the degree that even today the term ‘Luddite’ enjoys a common pejorative currency as a description of the technologically illiterate or recalcitrant. Yet this popular understanding of the phenomenon and its terminology is founded upon profound historical misconceptions.
‘Luddism’ in the strict sense refers top a particular period of riotous activity which occurred in the Midlands, West Riding and Lancashire regions over the very narrow time-frame of 1811-13 (although there were after-shocks of the phenomenon in the autumn of 1814 and the summer and autumn of 1816). The very name of the mythical ‘commander’ of the movement—Ned Ludd, and then, variously, Captain Ludd and General Ludd, etc., to whose authority communications preceding or coinciding with wrecking activity were assigned—only made its first appearance late in 1811 at an assembly of framework knitters held in Bulwell Forest near Nottingham; that is, when the 1811-13 wave of riots were already well underway. It is of course understandable that machine-breaking in general and Luddism in particular should be conflated in this manner since the outbreaks of 1811-13 stand out as the most dramatic, widespread and concentrated expression of the general phenomenon. The scale of the disturbances was certainly appreciated by the government of the time: at the height of the trouble the authorities had mustered in direct response a military force which it stationed in the Midlands and the north which—at some 12,000 strong—not only outstripped the force commanded by Wellington in the Portuguese expedition of 1808 but was also comfortably the largest counter-insurgency military deployment in England up to that point. Both in terms of its sheer scale and the consequent alarm that it generated the period 1811-13 already stands out in some relief in relation to the general phenomenon of machine-breaking with which it is regularly confused, and must therefore for our purposes be regarded as historically specific.
Yet hidden within the above generalisations there lies another historical simplification. For the events of 1811-13 consisted of not one but at least two (and possibly three) different social movements. As we shall see, just as there is machine-breaking and machine-breaking, Luddism in its concentrated and specific historical occurrence in 1811-13 was itself often a combination of different types of activity with often quite different targets and goals.
At this point we need to note that in order to understand why and how it occurs, the general phenomenon of machine-breaking must be conceptually broken down into different types of activity. Following Hobsbawm, we need—after discounting the destruction accompanying ‘ordinary’ rioting—to differentiate between attacks on machines as a means to an end, and attacks on machines as an end in itself. [3] While the latter is what is generally associated with the term ‘Luddism’ in its popular present-day meaning, it is the former which predominates within broad experience of machine-breaking in general; which itself was, quite simply, ‘a traditional and established part of industrial conflict in the period of the domestic and manufacturing system, and the early stages of factory and mine.’ [4] And when we come to examine Luddism in the strict sense—that is, the period of riotous activity in the Midlands and the north over 1811-13—it is clear that both these different types of activity occurred. In Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, The Luddites’ principle objective was the introduction of new labour-economising machinery; while in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, by contrast, machines were broken not to prevent their introduction but to coerce their owners into granting concessions regarding wages, prices and methods of production. While some of the causes of both these types of activity were similar, their actual immediate aims, however, were not.
The Luddite outbreaks of 1811-13 then, as we have seen, stand in relief with regard to machine-breaking in general by virtue of their geographical extent and their concentration in time, as well as the perception generated on behalf of the authorities that they represented a serious threat to the preservation of order. The origins of the outbreaks lay in a combination of the effects of the series of bad harvests of 1809-12—which forced up the price of food—and the consequences of the 1811 Orders in Council, passed in retaliation to Napoleon’s Continental System, which had the effect of foreclosing the lucrative north American export market. While the former resulted in generalised distress, the latter measure and the consequent collapse in the export trade had an exacerbating and particularly deleterious effect in those areas where manufacture depended on overseas markets.
Particularly sharply hit was the east Midland hosiery industry, a sector of manufacture which had already experienced a long history of disputes over wages, frame rents, truck payments and control over methods or production, and which was an area in which machine-breaking as an episodic form of ‘industrial action’ already had something of a pedigree. In these circumstances, merchant hosiers drove to cut costs though the reduction of prices paid to the framework knitters and by means of concentrating production on ‘cut-ups’—inferior stockings produced square and subsequently stitched which were produced on wider frames and which required less skilled (and therefore cheaper) labour.
In direct response to these developments, in February 1811, at the Midlands town of Arnold, a gang of knitters broke into a workshop and destroyed a set of frames which were being used to produce the cheaper cut-ups. Further disturbances involving riots and machine-breaking spread over a wider area over the course of that year: by December 2,000 troops had been stationed in Nottingham by the government as a counter-measure, and by February 1812 over 1,000 frames had been destroyed in around 100 separate attacks. In the interim, the government had declared machine-breaking a capital offence.
Several important points about this initial wave of Luddite activity need to be emphasised. Firstly, it is evident that the attacks on the machines were organised: frames were damaged simultaneously—on the same nights—in towns lying ten or fifteen miles apart. In addition, the attacks were also highly selective: in general only those frames which produced under-priced work were targeted. Moreover, it is significant that 1809 saw the repeal of the anti-innovation statutes which had been the focus of a concerted parliamentary campaign following an outbreak of machine-breaking undertaken by the West Country shearmen in 1799-1802: the oscillation between—and sometimes coincidence of—attempts at ‘constitutional’ reform and riot was already establishing itself as something of a pattern. In short, this initial outbreak of Luddism was by no means the frenzied and blind response it has sometimes been made out to be: it was organised and selective, and it occurred in a political context in which parliamentary reform was generally perceived to have failed. It was, in addition, in this case, not directed at new technology at all, but was rather prompted by the way that old machinery was being used:
Frames were seldom if ever injured unless they were employed on ‘cut-ups’, which was the most prolific cause of frame-breaking, or on other fraudulent work, or belonged to hosiers paying low wages or in kind, or to stockingers taking too many apprentices. It was not particular machinery but particular practices and particular employers against which the Luddites’ vengeance was directed. [5]
By the spring of 1812 the Midlands outbreak had largely died down: there had been nothing like a decisive victory for any party, although negotiations between representatives of the hosiers and the knitters had taken place, and the former often found it ‘expedient’—for the time being at least—to abandon the use of cut-ups and to pay higher wages.
While matters had quietened down in the Midlands, however, almost immediately disturbances had broken out in the cotton manufacturing regions of Lancashire and Cheshire, and also in the cropping branch of the woollen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
In the latter case, under the conditions of poor harvests and the collapse in trade similar to those experienced in the Midlands, over the course of 1812 a series of more ‘conventionally’ Luddite riots took place. The Yorkshire croppers were faced with the relatively recent introduction of new shearing frames which were far simpler to operate and much quicker to use. Up until the harsh conditions of 1812 resistance to the machines had been peaceful, but in the January of that year a Leeds mill employing the new frames was burned down. In an organised wave of night raids in the ensuing two months a number of mills in the general area were attacked; and in the April two rioters were killed in an attempted assault on the well-guarded William Cartwright mill. A week later an attempt was made on Cartwright’s life; he escaped, but at the end of the month one John Horsfall—a mill-owner who had been a particularly vociferous opponent of the rioters—was shot dead. As in the Midlands outbreak, the Yorkshire Luddite movement was both organised and focused in its aims; this time, however, it was the new machinery itself that was the initial target and the immediate trigger of the disturbances.
Following the assassination of Horsfall, however, Yorkshire machine-breaking practically ceased—although ‘Luddite’ activity so-called continued in the form of raids for arms, ammunition and money, and, increasingly, of straightforward robbery. Under the weight of the deployment of the military and the use of spies and informers, in January 1813 seventeen Luddite ‘ringleaders’ were hanged, and a further seven more transported.
In Lancashire and Cheshire, meanwhile, Luddite outbreaks were to take on even more complex and contradictory forms, where attacks or the threat of attacks (and mainly the latter) on the new power looms was significantly intermingled with food rioting and political agitation. The degree to which the overall outbreak of Luddism in this period incorporated more general political—if not insurrectionist—aims has been hotly disputed: in the case of the Lancashire outbreak, however, the particular combination of secret gatherings, swearing of oaths, food riots and ‘Luddite’ activity proper leads John Rule for one to conclude that ‘there was at least talk at large of a general rising.’ [6] As in Yorkshire, however, the movement ended on a wave of arrests, trials, executions and transportations. In June 1812 the Orders of Council were repealed; by that July Luddism in the northern cotton region was to all practical intents at an end.
While there were to be relatively minor re-occurrences of Luddism in the autumn of 1814 and in the summer and autumn of 1816, and machine-breaking itself was not to disappear as a phenomenon until the 1830s, by the beginning of 1813 the Luddite movement properly speaking had largely run its course.
Opinion has been divided ever since over how exactly to interpret the movement: over to what degree it was essentially a recrudescence of pre-industrial, agrarian forms of protest, or a harbinger of the social and political struggles that were to follow; and over how to situate Luddism in the long term course of development of the British labour movement. The debates, like much of the historiography of post-Industrial Revolution Britain, have tended to swing back and fore, and have tended to reflect the contemporary opinions of the historians concerned. [7] Fabian-influenced studies, such as that of the Hammonds, [8] have tended to regard the actual machine-breakers themselves as a group apart from those who sought parliamentary redress, while more Marxist-influenced historians have laid stress on the interlocking of the economic and political protests of the time. [9] As a consequence, the former approach tends to view Luddism as something of an aberration in the development of British working class political culture; the latter seeks to establish a more fundamental continuity.
There will probably be no definitive resolution to this dichotomy: the nature of the available evidence—a product of the very character of the movement itself and of the conditions under which it operated—seems to preclude such a resolution. It would appear likely however, that the truth of the matter—not uncommonly—lies somewhere in between the two poles: perhaps E. P. Thompson himself summed up the movement best when he described it as ‘the nearest thing to a “peasants’ revolt” of the industrial workers’, [10] a characterisation which expresses the essential contradictory nature of a movement which stood right at the birth of a new industrial working class culture. In short, Luddism was perhaps a unique movement because it had to face a unique world—the capitalist industrialisation facing it was in fact unprecedented. The old social order was breaking down: old social loyalties, bonds and antagonisms were being turned on their head in the brave new conditions of laissez-faire:
As workers ceased to market their own products, and came to depend on the employer for this, so they became interested in high wages rather than high prices for their products. They ceased to have common interests with the employers in restricting output and maintaining standards of quality. So guilds gradually gave way to organisations which would fight better for the wages and living conditions of those with only their labour to sell. [11]
One thing is certainly clear: the popular present-day pejorative meaning attached to the term ‘Luddite’ noted at the start of this essay is clearly somewhat off-beam when measured against the actual social movement itself—as Eric Hobsbawm’s summary of the outlook of the early-industrial worker with regard to technological progress would seem to indicate:
The worker [...] was concerned, not with technical progress in the abstract, but with the practical twin problems of preventing unemployment and maintaining the customary standard of life, which included non-monetary factors such as freedom and dignity, as well as wages. It was thus not to the machine as such that he objected, but to nay threat to these—above all to the whole change in the social relations of production which threatened him. ... where the change did not disadvantage absolutely, we find no special hostility to machines. [12]
It is thus clear that the continued use of the term ‘Luddite’ as a late twentieth-century insult does something of a disservice—based on ignorance—to the movement that gave rise to the word.
1 E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, in E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London, 1968), 7.
2 For an elaboration of this point, see George Rudé, The Crowd in History 1730-1848 (London, 1985), 70-77.
3 E. J. Hobsbawm, ibid., 7-12.
4 John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750-1850 (London, 1986), 363.
5 Frank Ongley Darvell, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford, 1969), 168.
7 For a considered if condensed summary of the main lines of the debates, see Rule, ibid.,369-75.
8 J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer1760-1832 (London, 1919).
9 See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), especially 642-659.
11 Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1971), 266.