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Luddites
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The Luddites were not the first or only machine wreckers. Because organized, large-scale strikes were impractical due to the scattering of manufactories throughout different regions, machine wrecking, which E. J. Hobsbawm calls "collective bargaining by riot," had occurred in Britain since the Restoration. For example, in 1675 Spitalfields narrow weavers destroyed "engines," power machines that could each do the work of several people, and in 1710 a London hosier employing too many apprentices in violation of the Framework Knitters Charter had his machines broken by angry stockingers. Even parliamentary action in 1727, making the destruction of machines a capital felony, did little to stop the activity. In 1768 London sawyers attacked a mechanized sawmill. Following the failure in 1778 of the stockingers' petitions to Parliament to enact a law regulating "the Art and Mystery of Framework Knitting," Nottingham workers rioted, flinging machines into the streets.
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The Luddites were a social movement of English workers in the early 1800s who protested - often by destroying textile machines - against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution that they felt threatened their jobs. The movement, which began in 1811, was named after a probably mythical leader, Ned Ludd. For a short time the movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British Army. Measures taken by the government included a mass trial at York in 1813 that resulted in many death penalties and transportations (deportment to a penal colony).
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Luddites typically have laudable goals and valid concerns. However, banning a useful technology is rarely effective, and even if it could be effective it would be very costly. After all, banning the technology means foregoing the benefits as well as the potential risks.
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Only three decades into the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites already had a good sense of the magnitude and severity of the changes it was bringing. As British scholar Adrian Randall has put it:
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When the English weavers who called themselves Luddites began rioting and destroying mechanized looms in the early part of the 19th century, they were met with the full force of the democratic state and 14,000 soldiers. When writer and self-described Neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale took a sledgehammer to a computer on the stage of an Utne Reader forum in January 1995... not a single cop showed up. Sale's action, as he and everyone else knew, was strictly performance; so, in a creepier sense, were the killings-by-mail by the man the FBI calls the Unabomber. Neo-Luddism got a lot of attention at the time of the publication of the Bomber's 35,000-word screed, which made the best-seller lists in an unauthorized, unabridged edition (The Unabomber Manifesto, Jolly Roger Press). Then the headline writers moved on to other topics, barely having touched on the fact that--theatrics aside--the Bomber isn't the only one having second thoughts about industrial technology.
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The original Luddites formed in Regency era England to protest the automation of the textile industry, primarily through the use of Jacquard looms. Their technique of protest has been called "collective bargaining by riot." In other words, they destroyed the machines that threatened their livelihoods. Some groups branched out and pulled up railroad tracks and destroyed other machines that were taking the place of semi-skilled labor. The group was organized under an apparently fictional leader named Ned Ludd, sometimes referred to as General Ludd or King Ludd. The Luddites were wiped out in 1816 when the English Parliament sent 12,000 troops to stop the rioting.
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Luddites