What is a Luddite? A Luddite is someone who is against new technology, but Luddites were a group of people who followed Ned Ludd, a person who was probably made up to support their cause.
These days, we refer to anyone who is against new forms of technology or even new ways of doing things as a Luddite. Luddites are against technology and they want to destroy technology, but in the world we live in today, that is an increasingly difficult thing to do. Also, Luddites don’t want to destroy all technology. They are against the things they see as harmful, but they don’t want to destroy the ones that are helpful, or labor saving, such as washing machines and microwaves.
So, what is a Luddite? They were a group of people who destroyed industrial machinery in factories between 1811 and 1817. Surprisingly, they didn’t do it because they were against technology or against the machines. They did it to persuade the owners of the factories to employ more qualified people and to stop driving wages down. They were not against more efficient machines, they just wanted to be the ones running those machines. They wanted more efficient machines because they could make more and better materials, but they wanted the machinists to have more training, and to be paid a higher wage. However, the owners of the factories wanted to have more efficient machines because anyone could use them and didn’t have to give any training, which meant they could hire cheaper people and make more profit.
The Luddites were renowned for smashing machines, particularly something called a stocking frame, which was a knitting machine that knitted stockings. It was one of the first machines in the industrialization of the textile industry and it could be operated by untrained people. In the 1700s, it was adapted to make lace, cotton stockings, and other things. It was also adapted to run on steampower. It was faster and cheaper than employing a host of knitters. This was the machine that the Luddites destroyed, which is possibly why people think they were against the idea of technology. However, this is not the case. The simple reason they attacked this machine is that it was very easy to get to, very easy to smash, and there were lots of these machines where they started to protest.
The Luddites were not the first people to destroy machines while protesting. When the stocking frame was first introduced, there were protests and machines were destroyed. When the cotton spinning machines and weaving machines were invented, again, people smashed some of them in protest. Protests like this were common and happened because people were losing their jobs and couldn’t eat. The protest was not against technology per se, so long as people could still eat, which they couldn’t.
The Luddites were not an organized group to begin with. The first smashing of machines took place on the night of March 11th, 1811. Britain was undergoing an economic crisis. The Napoleonic wars and the brewing wars in the USA were eating up money. Food couldn’t be imported from Europe and the price of bread was rising. People couldn’t get enough food to eat and there was poverty and starvation everywhere. Skilled machine workers were losing their jobs to unskilled cheap laborers and they couldn’t afford to eat. They started to protest against a textile manufacturing center in Nottingham. The army sent them home and they responded by coming back at night and smashing the machines. Other towns had the same problems and protests appeared there as well. The protests spread across northern England.
So, why have we associated the Luddites with being anti-technology. There are probably many reasons, but here are three of them. The first is that they becamse memorable by giving themselves a name. After the protests spread to other towns, the protestors started to organize themselves and whenever they smashed a machine, they said that “Ned Ludd smashed it.” Ned Ludd was said to be an apprentice who had been working on a stocking frame when his boss had shouted at him. He had responded by smashing the machine. The protestors wrote letters of protest that they signed “Ned Ludd’s Office.” There is no evidence at all for Ned Ludd and he was most probably made up. Still, having a name made the cause memorable.
The second reason was the government’s response. The protests were unconnected and were happening because people couldn’t eat. The government believed that the protests would spread across the whole of the UK, so they sent in the troops. Luddites were killed and the situation escalated. If the government hadn’t reacted in this way, the protests may just have petered out, in the same way so many others had.
The third reason is because of timing. The protests just happened to occur at a time when society was undergoing a huge change due to technology. The way people worked, lived, and even thought was changing because of the Industrial Revolution. The timing of the protests made it very easy for people to think that they were anti-technology protests. Part of this was because histories of the Luddites were written after the fact, with the knowledge of how much society would change because of technology. And this is what I learned today.
Image By John Beniston at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7588763
Sources
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocking_frame
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite