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The Aims of Luddism: An Historiographic View
Bill Holzapfel
Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School
Wyckoff, NJ
In the drama that was the English Industrial Revolution, the Luddites were among its most intriguing players. Happening at a time when industries were being revolutionized by new mechanization and organizational techniques, the machine-breaking perpetrated by the Luddites stands as the most direct and hostile opposition to the changes in society that were going on around them. One could argue that to understand the Luddites is to understand what the common worker was experiencing during this epochal shift in the nature of work. Despite their significance, however, the Luddites remain somewhat of an historical enigma. As they have tried to unravel the significance of the Industrial Revolution, historians have taken the industrial sabotage which occurred in its early days to mean quite different things.
There are, of course, many aspects of Luddism upon which historians readily agree. The Luddite disturbances took place in the Midlands (mainly Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire), Lancashire, and Yorkshire, with most of the sabotage raids occurring in 1811 and 1812 (though there were smaller outbreaks of violence in the Midlands until 1816.) Though the character of the attacks differed from region to region, most historians see enough similarities in the tactics and aims of these groups to categorize them under the same rubric. Most importantly, all scholars agree that the Luddites were not anti-technology. This is, of course, counter to the current popular perception of their actions; the term Luddite is used nowadays to denote someone who stubbornly refuses to use new methods and ideas, such as computers. The Luddites were not against machines per se, but against the threat to their livelihoods that some machines posed. This is evidenced by the fact that many machines were not the targets of Luddite violence and that most employers who continued to pay workers the established wage were left alone.
The issue upon which historians do not concur is: what did Luddism mean politically? Was it a local phenomenon or should it be seen in a national context? Did the Luddites in different regions coordinate their efforts, and was their movement the start of wider, more comprehensive protest movement which could have led to a more general workers’ rebellion? The purpose of this essay is to examine how these aspects of Luddism have been characterized by different historians over time. First, it will discuss the initial historical presentations of the subject, followed by the response made by Marxist historians of the 1960’s. Finally, it will consider how these questions are viewed by current scholars as well as how the Luddites are used by some in current political disputes as we live through another period of monumental economic realignment.
The Conventional View
The first scholars to assess the scope and significance of the Luddites were J.L. and Barbara Hammond. In The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (London: Longmans, Green, 1919), they devoted several chapters to a discussion of not only the details of how the Luddites operated, but also whether their operations had any wider political implications. Throughout their account, the Hammonds are clear in their belief that Luddism was strictly a local movement that posed no serious threat to industrialization. The Luddites were small bands of desperate men who acted with specific aims directed at specific employers with whom they had a dispute. As for wider goals and more national organization, the Hammonds dismissed any possibility that the Luddites had further ambitions of rebellion. They viewed the different Luddite bands as acting with complete independence of each other and that their efforts to communicate were ineffective and were no real threat to the economic system as a whole.
The Hammonds based their conclusions of the limited scope of Luddite aims on the fact that their vandalism coincided with active negotiations between workers and employers and their conclusion that the machine-breaking ceased because the principle aim of the workers , mostly the promise that prevailing wage rates would continue, had been achieved. As for Parliamentary concerns that Luddite outbreaks portended that something more sinister was in the works, the Hammonds were quick to dismiss them as being unfounded. They portrayed the stories of Luddites having secret meetings, stockpiling arms, and drilling in the woods under cover of darkness as farcical and the attempts that were made to build a wider movement were feeble at best. The trials of the Luddites shed little light on what happened in the Hammonds view, because nearly all the evidence presented came from spies and informants whose motivations can be called into serious question, and that these agents, particularly a shadowy figure to whom they refer as ‘B.”, served as agents provocateurs whose actions did more to perpetuate the alarmist fears that the Luddites were taking secret oaths and attempting to broaden their uprising than any action on the part of the Luddites themselves.
The next scholarly work to consider the Luddites was published in 1934, and would cement the Hammonds’ orthodox view of how these events should be viewed. F.O. Darvall’s Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934) echoed and intensified all of the Hammonds’ contentions about the nature and scope of Luddism. Darvall saw the Luddites as having limited aims, and pursued their machine-breaking only in particularly hard times, their violent methods only used as a last resort to augment negotiations between workers and employees. He shared the Hammonds’ view that they were only acting against factory owners who used techniques and machines which limited the number of jobs available, such as cut-up hosiery in the case of the Midlands, and that they ceased their frame-breaking as soon as concessions were granted. In addition, he was quite emphatic in his concurrence with the Hammonds’ assertion that there was no wider political agenda to the outbreaks of Luddite violence of 1811-1812.
Though Darvall was in complete agreement with the Hammonds on this last point, one is struck by the difference in tone between the two works. While the Hammonds expressed qualified doubts about the Luddites amounting to a substantial movement, Darvall was quite strong in his assertion that the Luddites had no broader agenda:
There is no evidence whatever of any political motives on the part of the Luddites. There is not one single instance in which it can be proved that a Luddite attack was directed toward anything deeper than disputes between masters and men, between workmen and their employers. There was not a single Luddite and hardly a single riot of any kind, with the exception of the unfortunate Brandreth and his colleagues of the ‘Pentridge Revolution’, against whom a charge of treason was advanced, or could lie. There is no sign, despite the great efforts of the spies to prove such motives, that the Luddites, or indeed any but a few unimportant, unrepresentative, irresponsible agitators, had any large or political designs. (p. 174).
Darvall was also quite dismissive of any notion that there was any attempt to organize the Luddites of the various regions into an insurrectionist movement:
Despite the most careful search no large dumps of arms, such as the spies talked about, were found. No connexion could be traced between the disaffected in one district and those in others, except in so far as the regular informers’ tales of itinerant delegates from London to Dublin, via the north of England and Glasgow, are to be believed. Despite every effort on the part of the authorities and spies no system of committees and no plan of revolution could be uncovered. All the evidence goes to prove, what General Maitland and others suggestions, that the disaffection was limited to the forms and places in which it showed itself. (p. 177).
In fact, Darvall went so far as to assert that a good deal of the vandalism attributed to the Luddites was actually committed by small bands of professionals: “The core of midland framebreaking was clearly the work of a small number of permanent, organized gangs, engaging regularly in Luddism, and making an income out of it.” (p. 188). Overall, Darvall wished to portray the Luddites as an inconsequential chapter in the history of the Industrial Revolution.
The Marxist Response
The view which the Hammonds and Darvall put forward, that the Luddites were a small, largely ineffective movement which had no wider political connotations, persisted through the first half of the twentieth century. Then in the 1960’s, Marxist historians challenged many of the conventionally held views regarding all aspects of British Industrialization, including the Luddites. The first commentator to challenge the conventional view of the Luddites was Eric Hobsbawm. In an article entitled “The Machine Breakers” published in his Labouring Man (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), Hobsbawm contended that the traditional view which marginalized the Luddites is due to prior historians’ assumption that technological progress was inevitable and resistance to it was pointless. He saw the actions of the Luddites as following a long tradition of collective bargaining by riot that was practiced by workers for centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Hobsbawm celebrated the actions of the Luddites as a conscious critique of capitalism and pointed out that their actions were popularly supported. Ultimately, he believed that Luddite machine wrecking was effective, even if only marginally so, and that it was the best method of opposition available to the working class prior to the advent of trade unionism.
The orthodox view of Luddism would have its most serious challenge in the formidable scholarship of E.P. Thompson. His monumental The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963) broke new ground in our understanding of many key aspects of industrialization and its effect on the people who lived through it. He devoted considerable space to both the history and historiography of the Luddites and directly questioned the conclusions reached by previous scholars. Thompson, like Hobsbawm, viewed the Luddite action in a decidedly sympathetic fashion as defiance of capitalist exploitation. He does, however, go further than Hobsbawm, asserting that the Luddites were the beginnings of a true insurrectionist force.
In contrast to the image one gets from the Hammonds and Darvall, that of desperate men driven by hunger to lash out, Thompson presented the Luddites as a canny and calculating group of insurgents. They were highly organized and well read, and the aims of their protest were not the machines but the system. They knew quite well, in Thompson’s view, what the imposition of laissez faire was doing to workmen’s lives and were determined to stop its spread. The aims of Luddism were much more far-reaching, not to mention more potentially dangerous to the status quo, than prior examples of industrial vandalism:
Although related to this tradition, the Luddite movement must be distinguished from it, first, by its high degree of organisation, second, by the political context within which it flourished. These differences may be summed up in a single characteristic: while finding its origin in particular industrial grievances, Luddism was a quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives. This is not to say that it was a wholly conscious revolutionary movement; on the other hand, it had a tendency towards becoming such a movement, and it is this tendency which is most often understated. (p. 553 - italics in original).
Thompson characterized the period as being politically charged, with Luddism becoming the focus of more diffused rebellious energy. He bolstered his assertion of the wider aims of the group by detailing how the Luddites, particularly those in Lancashire, “passed through its machine-breaking phase in a matter of three to four weeks.” (p. 569). By Thompson’s reckoning, the early vandalism which comes to mind when we think of Luddism was only a preliminary step toward building these men into an armed revolutionary movement.
Thompson addressed his predecessors quite directly when dealing with the questions at hand. He pulled no punches in openly questioning the motivations of the Hammonds:
“The Skilled Labourer is a fine book; but the chapters on Luddism read at times like a brief prepared on behalf of the Whig opposition, and intended to discredit the exaggerated claims made by the authorities as to the conspiratorial and revolutionary aspects of the movement.” (p. 575).
Thompson saw both the Hammonds and Darvall as being “caught up in the minutiae of day-to-day reports,” (p. 576), so much so that they could not see the forest for the trees. He saw their dismissal of Luddism’s wider aims as being as invalid as the most wild-eyed conspiracy tales that they rejected. Thompson maintained that anyone with a knowledge of geography would find it difficult to believe that Luddites of different regions had no connection with one another. As for the rejection of evidence as tainted by the Hammonds and Darvall, Thompson insisted that this was far too close-minded. He asserted that all evidence of the period was tainted in some way, and refusing to take it into account at all was akin to tossing out the baby with the proverbial bath water. In some paragraphs, Thompson came close to outright ridicule of his opponents, arguing that their willful rejection of any wider meaning to the events of the period was nothing less than absurd.
Attempts To Settle the Question
Clearly, the Marxists had given the student of the period pause to reflect on the broader implications of the Luddite movement. Was it a local phenomenon of disgruntled workmen or a burgeoning revolution? Were the Marxists right to critique the Whig assumptions of previous scholars as the reason why they refused to see the Luddites as political? Or can the reverse of that criticism be leveled at the Marxists: Were they so eager to see class struggle and a challenge to capitalism that they ascribed it to the Luddites without sufficient evidence? All scholarship on the Luddites which followed this polarization can be seen as trying to justify or reconcile these two divergent interpretations.