Luddite
[1][2] Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
[4] Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.
[3] The movement utilised the eponym of Ned Ludd, an apocryphal apprentice who allegedly smashed two stocking frames in 1779 after being criticized and instructed to change his method.
Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710[12] and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727.
"[10] Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large-scale strikes.
[13][14] An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centring on breaking threshing machines.
[15] The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories.
Their main areas of operation began in Nottinghamshire in November 1811, followed by the West Riding of Yorkshire in early 1812, and then Lancashire by March 1813.
[22] The writings of Midlands Luddites often justified their demands through the legitimacy of the Company of Framework Knitters, a recognized public body that already openly negotiated with masters through named representatives.
In North West England, textile workers lacked these long-standing trade institutions and their letters composed an attempt to achieve recognition as a united body of tradespeople.
In Yorkshire, the letter-writing campaign shifted to more violent threats against local authorities viewed as complicit in the use of offensive machinery to exert greater commercial control over the labor market.
[23] This sparked the Luddite movement among the croppers of Yorkshire, who used a power hammer dubbed "Enoch" to break the frames of the cropping machines.
[28] 12,000 government troops, most of them belonging to militia or yeomanry units, were involved in suppression of Luddite activity, which historian Eric Hobsbawm claimed was a larger number than the British army which the Duke of Wellington led during the Peninsular War.
[34]Government officials sought to suppress the Luddite movement with a mass trial at York in January 1813, following the attack on Cartwrights Mill at Rawfolds near Cleckheaton.
Underemployment was chronic during this period,[40] and it was common practice to retain a larger workforce than was typically necessary for insurance against labour shortages in boom times.
The combination of seasonal variations in wage rates and violent short-term fluctuations springing from harvests and war produced periodic outbreaks of violence.
[43] According to a manifesto drawn up by the Second Luddite Congress (April 1996; Barnesville, Ohio), neo-Luddism is "a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age".
