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From another aspect we may see the Luddite movement as transitional. We must see through the machine-breaking to the motives of the men who wielded the great hammers. As ‘a movement of the people’s own’, one is struck not so much by its backwardness as by its growing maturity. Far from being ‘primi…

[...] With a year’s intermission, war had continued for almost twenty years. The people had few civil and no trade union liberties. They were not gifted with historical clairvoyance, so that they might be comforted by the knowledge that in twenty years (when many of them would be dead) the middle c…

Luddism lingers in the popular mind as an uncouth, spontaneous affair of illiterate handworkers, blindly resisting machinery. But machine-breaking has a far longer history. The destruction of materials, looms, threshing-machines, the flooding of pits or damage to pit-head gear, or the robbing or fi…

Even if we make allowances for the cheapening of the product, it is impossible to designate as ‘progressive’, in any meaningful sense, processes which brought about the degradation, for twenty or thirty years ahead, of the workers employed in the industry. And, viewed from this aspect, we may see L…

[...] The Bill making frame-breaking a capital offence was deprecated even by those hosiers whose interests it was supposed to defend. And, in this light, the conventional picture of the Luddism of these years as a blind opposition to machinery as such becomes less and less tenable. What was at iss…