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Features
People who are tired of cyberspace sometimes call themselves
"Luddites." The original Luddites were a major force
in 19th century British industrial politics. They trashed the
technology that was putting people out of work. Paul
Kennedy considers the historical Luddites and follows
their progress into the present.
 When
I first heard about the Luddites smashing cotton looms
in the early nineteenth century England, I thought they
were almost too good to be true. They popped up in a
high-school history class, where they were presented
as preposterous lunatics who truly believed that the
"inevitable march of progress" could be halted
by simply smashing small machines.
The Luddites were people who marched over moors in
search of machines that were stealing work from men
and women. They would swoop down in midnight raids on
workshops and mini-factories. They'd smash and totally
destroy the machines they said took work away from people.
They didn't smash the machines that made work easier.
They didn't smash the machines that improved the product,
making it stronger or better or more beautiful. They
smashed the machines whose role it was to make people
redundant.
There must have been therapeutic benefits derived from
the smashing of the very machines that you believed
were putting you and your brothers and sisters out of
work. Every standard-vision Luddite back in 1811 and
1812 came equipped with a large and heavy mallet or
hammer with which to smash machines. They called their
hammers Enoch's hammer after Enoch
Thompson, who forged iron hammerheads in his
Yorkshire foundry. These hammers were first used against
machines in Nottingham in the autumn of 1811. Luddites,
happily brandishing their Enoch's hammers, smashed at
least 800 stocking frames in late night raids during
November and December. One Luddite was killed. 2,500
troops were dispatched from London. The Luddite Revolution
had begun. - Paul Kennedy
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Resources
Annotated Reading List
by Paul Kennedy
 Liberty
or Death: Radicals, Republicans & Luddites 1793 - 1823,
by Alan Brooke and Lesley Kipling.
Garian Press, Huddersfield, 1993. Available through the Tolson
Memorial Museum in Huddersfield.
Perhaps the best book of politically inspired local history
that I have ever had the priviledge of reading. It's the academic
underpinning of Ms. Kipling's On the Trail of the Luddites,
which provides an entirely satisfactory itinerary for
a walking tour of West Yorkshire.
Progress Without People, by
David F. Noble. Published by Charles H. Kerr,
Chicago, 1993.
Noble's personal history (he's been fired by both M.I.T. and
the Smithsonian for his outspoken anti-technological statements)
makes his political take on Luddism burn with a certain righteous
indignation. Saul Alinsky would be proud!
The Risings of the Luddites
(Chartists and Plug-Drawers) by Frank Peel,
1880.
Re-published by Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, New York, 1968
with a new introduction by E. P. Thompson!
Rousing late-Victorian narrative history that proves the process
of docu-drama was not invented by Truman Capote
and Norman Mailer. A real page-turner, definitely
NOT bedtime reading!
Before the Luddites, by
Adrian Randell. Published by Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Impeccable scholarship from a historian who's humanistic soul
is apparent between every line of original research. Randall
paints the late-eighteenth century background against which
mechanization must be set. He thereby EXPLAINS Luddism.
Rebels Against the Future:
Lessons For the Computer Age, by Kirkpatrick
Sale. Published by Addison/Wesley, 1995.
I first confronted Kirkpatrick Sale when I typed "Luddites"
into the search engine on my personal computer. He appeared
in a feature interview in WIRED magazine. He
smashes computers on stages all over the United States. He's
a real Luddite.
The Luddites: Machine-Breaking
in Regency England, by Malcolm I. Thomis.
Published by Ashgate Publishing Company; Reprint edition (May
1993).
On the list, because it's the book that somehow seems to be
almost everywhere, whenever you start to look for books on
Luddism ... It's not terribly well-written. It's not terribly
passionate or insightful. It's just there!
The Making of the English Working
Class, by E.P. Thompson. Published by
Vintage, 1966.
Great place to end this list! Start reading about the Luddites...
Then look for other interesting topics in the index. You'll
end up wanting to learn more about Levellers and Diggers and
Ranters and Ravers... and, yes, maybe even Plug-Drawers!
Luddites and Friends was
first broadcast on IDEAS in 1997. The program is available
in on tape or CD as well as in transcript form from IDEAS
Transcripts. Go to our transcript
page on the web site for ordering information.
 Printable
version
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