I n April 1812, General Ned Ludd looked across the face of England and saw, with sorrowing heart, the desperate, dire condition to which the onrushing Industrial Revolution had reduced those weavers and combers, those finishers and dyers, whose leader and whose mythical creation - he was. These were men who had known modest prosperity when the textile trades were cottage industries, in communities where custom and convention were the secure and comforting warp and woof of the social fabric and had been for centuries, who now were reduced to working for pennies when there was any work to be had. Forced to send their wives and little children off to factories for the pittances that went to buy food when there was any to be had, they were condemned to a life of soot and filth and rain as black as ink, with sewage for drinking water, and shacks and hovels for shelter starvation and disease so prevalent that a labourer's life expectancy in the industrial cities was not much more than 20 years, and, in all, as one cry from the stocking knitters put it, 'a state of misery wretchedness itself can not depict'. They were men who were victims of giant new factories, many run by never-ceasing steam engines, that allowed a single man or woman (who could endure endless hours, gruelling work and harsh supervision in intolerable conditions) to do the work that two or three hundred men had done just decades before; but moreover, victims of a giant new factory system, in which for the first time the machine became dominant over the human, and the old ideas of what were proper and rewardable modes of work were overturned, the old customs and tenets of honest wages, good goods, and just prices were discarded in place of relations built upon power, wealth, success, and a morality guided by no aim higher or more finely spun than profit. And so it was, nearly two centuries ago, that General Ludd could also look across the vast mid-section of England and see, with gladdening heart, the sporadic uprising of his men against this advancing menace of industrialism, men so driven by their misery and despair that they had taken to smashing hated machines with sledgehammers, attacking factories with torches and guns, stoning the homes of manufacturers, commandeering stalls in the market to hand out foodstuffs, and, for the first time, in an attack on a factory in Yorkshire, laying down their lives, four brave souls of them, in service to the cause of Luddism. One of their letters, delivered that week to a manufacturer in Stockport, not far from Manchester, conveyed the spirit then firing their hearts: "We think it our bounden duty to give you this notice that is, if you do not cause those machines to be removed within the bounds of 7 days, your factory and all that it contains will and surely be set on fire. It is not our desire to do you the least injury, but we are fully determined to destroy both machines and steam engines let who will be the owners. We neitherregard those that keeps them, nor the British army, for we will conquer both or die in the conflict." On the bright cold morning of April 15 some warriors in the Luddite army gathered on a field outside of Stockport and declared themselves a Luddite Congress, convened to decide on future tactics and targets. Little is known of what transpired there; all of the Luddites' actions were criminal (even meeting in a field), and most of them punishable by death, so they were little inclined to leave much of a paper trail. But it seems that they decided to press on with the attacks against the largest and most hated factories and branch out with night raids of small bands, calling themselves 'Ludd's men', marching across the countryside to take food, money, supplies, and weapons from the rich. Five days later a huge mob of several thousand assaulted a factory at Middleston, after which at least 10 and more probably 30 attackers lay dead, and the factory unscathed; nine days later a band of men and women set fire to a factory at Westhoughton, not far away, and reduced it to ashes within hours, a damage estimated to be £6,000; two weeks later a small unit of four men set upon a manufacturer in Hudders Field, some 30 miles away, and shot him to death, the first and only casualty on the other side.

Carrot and stick



The response to all this unrest by the British government was swift and vengeful. It sent

2,000 additional soldiers into the affected regions so that by May the army of General Ludd was surrounded by no fewer than 14,000 men, 4,000 of them on horseback, plus, in every town and city, neighbourhood militias and deputised constables on the prowl after dark. With the carrot of extraordinary rewards (£50,000 and more) and the stick of jail, torture, and harassment, it was not long before the Luddite canvas began to unravel aided considerably, it seems, by a growing feeling among the citizens of Luddite country that the General's men had gone too far. As long as violence was limited to attacks on machines and untended factories, the people of the industrial counties, most of them suffering too in these terrible times, gave support to the Luddite armies and would say nothing to betray their friends and neighbours, no matter what rewards were dangled, what pressures were impacted. When violence was extended to fellow humans, however, manufacturers who no matter how wrongheaded about what they were doing to the workers were still lifelong members of the community, men entitled to the full passage of their lives, that seems to have gone beyond the bounds, and one senses that the silent support of the general folk began to fray. And we do know that in October, six months after the assassination of the Yorkshire manufacturer, the mother of one Luddite broke after being kidnapped by a local magistrate, which led to additional testimony from neighbours and fellow workers, and finally to the arrest and eventual trial of the four assassins. They were found guilty; it broke the back of the Luddite rising; with their deaths, in January 1813, dangling from a stout beam in the Yorkshire prison, and with now three dozen shot dead, 24 hanged, 37 transported, at least 40 jailed, the armies of General Ludd were effectively extinguished. It was a terrible cost, but it was not without its effect. Luddism lost, and the Industrial Revolution won, but it did make its impact, causing at least £1.5 million of damage, slowing the pace of machine adoption in much of middle England, raising what was called then 'the machinery question' i.e., what is the role of technology in society and putting it on the national agenda, and serving ever after as the symbol of those who reject and resist technologies that threatenlives and livelihoods and demand that society pay heed and awaken to the tragedy being wrought within it.