Luddites

The Luddites were English textile workers who, between 1811 and 1816, organised night raids to smash machinery that threatened their wages, skills and working conditions. Beginning in Nottinghamshire and spreading to Yorkshire and Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution, they were crushed by troops, mass trials, executions and transportation. Their name later became shorthand for anyone who resists new technology.

The name was already in use by the movement in 1811. It was taken from Ned Ludd, an apprentice of doubtful historical existence who, the story went, broke two stocking frames in 1779 when told off for his work. Threatening letters to mill owners and officials were signed by "Captain", "General" or "King" Ludd, and legends placed his home at Anstey near Leicester or in Sherwood Forest.

Machine-breaking had a long history in the English textile trades. Stocking knitters had acted together at various times since 1675, and new cotton-spinning machines in Lancashire met violent resistance in 1768 and 1779. The years 1810 to 1812 were especially hard: the cost of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon's Continental System and conflict with the United States brought high unemployment and inflation. Many Luddites were skilled machine operators, and they were not hostile to machines as such, but to employers who used them to undercut wages and customary practices. The historian Eric Hobsbawm called their tactic "collective bargaining by riot".

The movement began at Arnold, Nottinghamshire, on 11 March 1811. Raids spread across Nottinghamshire from November 1811, moved into Yorkshire's West Riding early in 1812 and reached Lancashire by March 1813. Each region attacked different machines: in the Midlands, wide knitting frames that turned out cheap lace; in the North West, steam-powered looms; in Yorkshire, the shearing frames and gig mills that finished woollen cloth. Yorkshire croppers broke frames with heavy hammers nicknamed "Enoch", mocking Enoch Taylor of Marsden, who made the cropping machines.

Luddites drilled at night on the moors, held demonstrations and sent letters explaining their grievances. In the North West, where workers lacked long-established trade bodies, these letters often called for minimum wages and an end to child labour. Luddites clashed with soldiers at Burton's Mill, Middleton, and at Westhoughton Mill in Lancashire.

The government sent about 12,000 troops, most of them militia and yeomanry, against the Luddites, a force Hobsbawm noted was larger than the army Wellington took to Portugal in 1808. Near Huddersfield, George Mellor and three companions ambushed and killed the mill owner William Horsfall; one turned informer, and Mellor and the other two were hanged. In 1812 Parliament made machine-breaking a capital crime, a measure Lord Byron opposed in the House of Lords, where he had defended the workers in a speech on 27 February 1812.

After an attack on Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds, near Cleckheaton, the authorities charged more than 60 men at a mass trial in York in January 1813. Many cases collapsed and 30 men were acquitted, but executions and transportation of the convicted quickly broke the movement. Isolated attacks continued, such as the smashing of Heathcote's lace machine at Loughborough in 1816. The Pentrich Rising of 1817, led by the probable former Luddite Jeremiah Brandreth, is sometimes seen as the last Luddite act.

Later protests followed a similar pattern, notably the Swing Riots of 1830, when farm labourers in southern and eastern England broke threshing machines, while the Chartists soon turned working-class grievances into a political campaign. The Luddites are remembered in folk songs such as "The Cropper Lads". Today "Luddite" describes someone wary of new technology, and economists use the phrase "Luddite fallacy" for the belief that labour-saving machines must cause lasting unemployment.

Our 1815 map shows the British Empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Luddite disturbances were dying down.