The Luddites

The Full Story

You've used this word as an insult your entire life. Luddite. Someone who's afraid of technology. Stuck in the past. That's not what it means. Not even close.

Nottingham, 1811. Skilled textile workers, croppers, stockingers and weavers, were the aristocracy of English labour. They trained for years. They earned good wages. Their craft required skill, judgment, and experience.

Then factory owners bought machines that could do the work faster with unskilled labour at a fraction of the cost. The machines didn't just change how cloth was made. They destroyed an entire class of skilled workers and replaced them with children working sixteen-hour shifts.

The Luddites didn't smash machines because they feared technology. They smashed specific machines in specific factories that were being used to drive down wages and destroy livelihoods. They were surgically precise. They broke the frames that were producing inferior goods with cheap labour and left untouched the machines in factories that paid fair wages.

George Mellor, a twenty-two-year-old cropper, led raids across Yorkshire with military discipline. Lord Byron defended them in Parliament. The government's response was savage. Around 12,000 troops were deployed against the Luddites, more than Wellington had taken to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War. At York in January 1813, 17 men were hanged: 3 for the murder of the mill owner William Horsfall, and 14 more for the attack on Rawfolds Mill and related offences. Sources vary slightly on the total, but 17 matches the fullest accounts of the two hanging days. Many more were transported to Australia.

The Luddites weren't anti-technology. They were anti-exploitation. And that distinction matters more today than ever.