The Luddites Were Not Against Machines. They Were Against Being Discarded

The first attacks came at night in March 1811, in the knitting villages around Nottingham. Groups of men, some with blackened faces, broke into workshops and smashed stocking frames, the wooden and iron machines on which framework knitters made hosiery. They did not smash every frame. They chose particular ones, owned by particular masters, and left the rest alone. Letters began to arrive at the homes of hosiers and officials signed by a commander nobody could find: Ned Ludd, sometimes General Ludd, sometimes King Ludd. He did not exist. He did not need to. Within a year the movement named after him had spread into Yorkshire and Lancashire, Parliament had made breaking a stocking frame a crime punishable by death, and a young poet had stood up in the House of Lords to tell the government it was hanging the wrong people. Two centuries later, the word "Luddite" is used to mean someone who is afraid of technology. That is almost exactly backwards.

In short: The Luddites of 1811 to 1813 were skilled workers who attacked machines owned by employers using them to cut wages, flood the trade with cheap goods and break the customs that protected their livelihoods. Parliament answered with troops and the gallows rather than with any of the reforms the workers had asked for. Their real argument was about who shares the gains from new technology, and that argument is back with artificial intelligence.

The frame was not new

Here is the first thing the popular image gets wrong. The stocking frame was not a new invention in 1811. It had been around since the late sixteenth century. Framework knitters had worked on these machines for generations, often renting them from the hosiers who sold the finished goods. They were not frightened of machinery. They were machine operators.

What changed in the early nineteenth century was how the machines were being used and who was being paid. The Napoleonic Wars had disrupted trade, and demand for fine hosiery had collapsed. Hosiers responded by cutting the rates they paid per piece while keeping the frame rents knitters owed. Some began producing what the workers called cut-ups: wide pieces of knitted fabric cut into the shape of stockings and sewn together, cheaper and shoddier than properly fashioned stockings, which unravelled quickly. Others hired unapprenticed workers, called colts, at lower wages, undermining the training system that had kept the craft skilled and its pay decent.

The frames the Luddites broke were, in many cases, the frames belonging to masters who were doing these things. The message was targeted: pay the agreed rates, stop making cheap goods that ruin the trade's name, stop undercutting skilled workers. Historians have long noted that this was a form of collective bargaining by other means. Trade unions were illegal under the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which banned workers from organizing to raise wages. Petitions to Parliament for regulation of the trade had gone nowhere. Breaking frames was the leverage that remained.

Yorkshire, Lancashire and the power loom

The movement looked different in each region, because the threats were different.

In the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Luddites were mostly croppers, highly skilled and well-paid men who finished woollen cloth by hand, raising the nap and shearing it with enormous shears. New shearing frames and gig mills could do much of that work with far fewer people. Here the machines were genuinely new, and they threatened to wipe out an entire trade in a few years. In April 1812 a large group of Luddites attacked Rawfolds Mill, whose owner had installed the new machinery and prepared to defend it with armed soldiers. The attack failed, and two of the attackers were mortally wounded. Later that month a mill owner named William Horsfall, an outspoken enemy of the Luddites, was shot dead on the road. That killing hardened the government's response.

In Lancashire and Cheshire, the targets included power looms in the cotton districts, where hand-loom weavers were being pushed toward destitution. Some of the actions there merged with food riots in a year of high prices and hunger.

What tied the regions together was not hatred of machines but a sense that working people were being made to bear the entire cost of a transition that enriched others, and that every legal avenue for doing anything about it had been closed.

Parliament reaches for the rope

The government's response was overwhelming. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the disturbed counties. Spies and informers were sent into the communities. In early 1812 Parliament passed a law making the destruction of stocking frames a capital crime.

On February 27, 1812, Lord Byron, then twenty-four, rose in the House of Lords to give his first speech, and he spent it opposing that bill. He had grown up in Nottinghamshire and had seen the conditions of the knitters. He argued that the men breaking frames had been driven to it by poverty and by employers who had thrown them out of work, and that the government was proposing to answer hunger with the gallows. He asked whether there were not already enough capital crimes on the statute books. He lost. The bill passed.

In January 1813, a special court at York tried dozens of men accused of Luddite offences. Many were hanged, including the men convicted of Horsfall's murder. Others were transported to the penal colonies in Australia. The executions, combined with an improving economy, effectively ended the main wave of the movement, though outbreaks continued for several years.

The workers had asked, in various ways, for a minimum price for their labour, enforcement of apprenticeship rules, limits on shoddy goods and the right to organize. They got none of those things. They got the noose and the regiment.

It is worth pausing on how lopsided the law was. Workers who combined to bargain over wages could be prosecuted. Employers faced no comparable restraint on cutting pay, and the old statutes that had once let magistrates set wages in some trades were falling out of use and would soon be repealed. The state was not neutral between the two sides. It had decided that one side's organizing was a crime and the other's was commerce.

What the economists admitted later

There is a strange coda that deserves to be better known. David Ricardo, one of the founders of classical economics and a champion of free markets, had argued that new machinery benefited every class in society. In 1821, in the third edition of his "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation," he added a new chapter titled "On Machinery." In it he conceded that he had been wrong, or at least incomplete: the introduction of machinery, he now wrote in substance, could harm the interests of the labouring class, at least for a time, and the workers' belief that it did was not based on prejudice and error but on correct principles of political economy.

In other words, within a decade of the hangings at York, the most respected economist in Britain had come round to a version of the Luddites' point. Machines raise output. Whether they raise wages depends on who owns them, how the gains are distributed and what happens to the people displaced.

The strongest case that the Luddites were wrong

It is only fair to make the opposing argument seriously, and it is a strong one.

Over the following century, the industrial revolution produced an increase in living standards beyond anything in previous human history. The textile machinery the Luddites attacked made clothing cheap for everyone, including the children and grandchildren of the people who resisted it. If workers had succeeded in halting mechanization, the argument goes, Britain would have been poorer, and so would its workers. Economic historians still debate how long wages took to rise, but most agree that over the long run they rose a great deal.

That is true, and progressives should say so plainly. Technological progress has been one of the great engines of human welfare. Nobody serious wants to go back to hand-knitting.

But notice the phrase "over the long run." For the croppers of Yorkshire and the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire, there was no long run. Many of them died poor. Their skills became worthless, their communities hollowed out, and the gains went to others. The question was never whether machines should exist. It was whether the people whose livelihoods were destroyed would share in what the machines produced, or simply be discarded. In 1812, the answer from Parliament was the second one.

What eventually spread the gains more widely was not the machines alone. It was legal unions, after the Combination Acts were repealed in 1824; factory acts limiting hours and child labour; public education; the vote for working men; and, much later, social insurance. Those were political choices, won by organizing, often against fierce opposition. The long run was not automatic. People built it.

The same question about AI

The reason this history matters now is that the Luddites' question is the central question about artificial intelligence. AI tools can write, draw, code, summarize and answer questions. They may raise productivity enormously. The question is who captures that productivity: the companies that own the models, the businesses that deploy them, or the workers whose skills they draw on and whose jobs they reshape.

There is a modern example of how workers can answer that question without breaking anything. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for months, and AI was one of the central issues. The contract it won included protections on how studios could use AI in writing, including that AI-generated material cannot be treated as source material that reduces writers' credit or pay. The actors' union, SAG-AFTRA, won provisions requiring consent and compensation for digital replicas of performers. Those are the Luddites' demands, translated: the new tools may be used, but not as a way to throw the people who do the work aside.

Most workers do not have a union contract to bargain with. That is why the policy questions matter: whether workers have a real right to organize and bargain over how new technology is introduced, whether displaced workers get training and income support that actually works, how the tax system treats income from capital compared with income from labour, and whether the companies building AI pay for the creative work their models learn from. Each of those is a choice. None of them is decided by the technology itself.

How a protest became an insult

The movement chose its mascot with some humour. According to a story that circulated at the time and may be pure legend, a young stocking knitter named Ned Ludd had smashed a frame in a fit of anger some decades earlier, and from then on, whenever a frame was found broken, people would say Ludd must have done it. Whether or not he ever lived, the name gave the movement something useful: a leader the authorities could never arrest, and a signature that anyone could sign.

The meaning of the word drifted over the following century and a half. By the twentieth century, "Luddite" had become shorthand for anyone who distrusted new technology, the uncle who will not get a smartphone, the office worker suspicious of the new software. The historians who studied the actual movement objected. The most influential of them, E. P. Thompson, argued in his 1963 history of the English working class that the Luddites and others like them should be rescued from the contempt of later generations who judged them only by the fact that they lost. They had a coherent view of how a trade should work, he argued, in which trades carried customs, wages carried expectations of fairness, and the community had a say in how work was organized.

That view lost to a different one, in which the market set the price of labour and anything that interfered with it was an obstruction. The defeat was so complete that the losers' name became a joke. It is worth asking why. Words that make a cause sound foolish are a form of power. If wanting a share in the gains from new machines is called being against machines, the argument is over before it starts.

The same move is made now. Workers who ask how AI will be introduced at their jobs, or who want a say in it, are sometimes told they are standing in the way of progress. The Luddites' history suggests a better response: ask who decided what progress means, and who was in the room.

What you can do

The frame-breakers had no vote and no legal union. You have both. Ways to use them:

1. See where workers are organizing now. The labor page shows the newest union elections the NLRB has counted, who won, and how union membership has changed over time. Many recent drives have involved workers whose jobs are changing because of new technology.
2. Find groups that support workers in your state. The organizations directory lists unions, worker centres and legal aid groups by cause in every state.
3. Ask your representatives about AI and work. Use the representatives lookup to reach your House member, senators and state legislators. Ask whether they support workers' right to bargain over AI and protections for people whose jobs are displaced.
4. Follow the debate. Our workers and unions page collects the latest reporting on organizing, wages and the future of work.

Ned Ludd never existed. The knitters and croppers who signed his name did, and what they wanted was not a world without machines. They wanted a place in the one the machines were making.