The Luddites: At War with the Future
Two hundred years ago Britain was gripped by a wave of violent machine breaking, as skilled textile workers, invoking the mythical Ned Ludd, attacked factories and factory owners in an attempt to defend their livelihoods. Richard Jones looks at how the phenomenon affected the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire.
The term Luddism has entered everyday usage as an expression for hostility to technology and progress, but the original phenomenon was far more nuanced and sophisticated than that. The Luddite disturbances of 1812 were part of a much older tradition of food rioting and political unrest and stemmed also from the precise status of certain forms of skilled labour in English law and society.
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