Were the Luddites enemies of progress?

The short answer

• Machines threatened skilled trades. New machines threatened skilled trades within a few years: shearing frames trimmed woollen cloth by machine, wide knitting frames turned out broad sheets of fabric cut and sewn into cheap, poorly finished stockings, and steam-powered looms began to do the hand weaver’s work. A cropper, a hand finisher of woollen cloth who had served a seven-year apprenticeship, or a weaver who had once earned a craftsman’s wage, could see the machine that would replace him in the next valley. Their protest defended a whole way of life, with its customs of training, fair rates and independence, at a time when employers were cutting rates in a depressed wartime economy.
• War, hunger and depression. Hunger turned grievance into action, because the worst protests came when war, bad harvests and blocked trade made food dear and work scarce. The Luddite machine-breaking of 1811–13 fell during the long war against France, when trade with Europe and America was blocked and unemployment rose, and the Corn Law of 1815, which barred foreign wheat until British prices were high in order to protect landowners’ rents, kept bread dear after the war ended. Protest peaked in the hard years of 1811–12, 1816–19, 1830 and 1842, so hunger set the timing of revolt even where machines supplied the grievance.
• Laws that silenced workers. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made trade unions illegal until 1824, and working men had no vote, so they had no lawful way to bargain or to change the law. Parliament had also repealed old laws that fixed wages and protected apprenticeships. When petitions failed, as the weavers’ appeals for a minimum wage did in 1808 and 1811, direct action seemed the only means they had left. The law had closed the peaceful routes before workers chose violent ones.
• Reformers gave anger a programme. Radical writers and orators such as the journalist William Cobbett and the public speaker Henry Hunt argued that hardship came from a corrupt Parliament elected by a small minority, so the cure was reform of the vote. Cheap newspapers, reading rooms and mass meetings spread that argument across the industrial districts. By the 1830s it had turned local grievances into a national political movement with a single programme, the People’s Charter, whose six demands began with votes for all men. Political reform promised a remedy that machine-breaking could never deliver.

What it changed

Reform reaches the middle classes first. Industrial wealth won political power before industrial labour did. The Reform Act of 1832 gave new industrial towns such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds their own members of Parliament and gave the vote to many middle-class men, but it excluded almost all workers, a betrayal that fed Chartism, the mass campaign for votes for all men. Many urban working householders gained the vote in 1867, and many in the counties in 1884, so the vote followed organised pressure one slow step at a time.

Trade unions become lawful. The law turned slowly from punishing trade unions to protecting them. The Combination Acts, which had banned unions, were repealed in 1824–25 and unions grew in the skilled trades, yet in 1834 six Dorset labourers from Tolpuddle were transported, meaning shipped as convicts to Australia, for swearing a union oath. By the 1870s unions had secure legal standing in Britain. The right to organise, a crime in 1800, had become part of how industrial society governed itself.

Resistance spreads with industry. Wherever machines arrived, workers resisted them in similar ways. The silk weavers of Lyon rose in 1831 and 1834, the Silesian linen weavers in 1844, and textile workers in Japan and India later struck against long hours and wage cuts. The British pattern of protest proved the first of many, and states everywhere answered it with the same mixture of force and reform.