Writings of the Luddites

Abstract

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to review this book, he replied: “Luddites? You mean, the Flat Earthers?” There is a distinction, I reminded him, between science and technology, and the Luddites had no problem, qua Luddites, with modern science. They objected to a few machines that were ruining their lives as artisans in the English textile industry. I could have added that Jeffrey Burton Russell's book Inventing the Flat Earth demonstrates that, “with extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat” and that even the belief that people had believed the Earth was flat did not arise until around 1870, in a time of controversy between scientists and the general culture over the theory of evolution. My friend is not a historian or scientist (but then neither am I), and I concluded that his remark meant no more than “It's high time you got a cell phone.” When reading an article on historiography and genetics some time later, however, I came across a famous geneticist quoted as saying that, among anthropologists and historians of prehistory, “there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines.” He meant that the anthropologists and historians resented the interference of geneticists in their disciplines. But the Luddites held no brief against transmission electron microscopy or carbon dating or microbiome sequencers.Misunderstandings and misapplications of the term Luddites (which, literally, means followers of the English general Ned Ludd, who never existed but was said at the time to live, like Robin Hood, in Sherwood Forest) are regarded as artifacts of something called “Luddite silence.” The Luddites, it has been taught, were more or less illiterate and left no texts to interpret. The aim of Binfield's Writings of the Luddites—an annotated collection of poems, songs, manifestos, and threatening letters written between 1811 and 1817—is to demonstrate that “the Luddites were not silent.” Their opponents constructed the myth of silence by “ignoring, reducing, or rendering curious or impotent those Luddite texts . . . known to exist.” The Luddites’ chief opponents were not engineers, let alone scientists, but “dishonorable capitalist depredators” who were met with “the sturdy self-reliance of a community prepared to resist for itself the notion that market forces rather than moral values should shape the fate of labor.” The myth that “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver,” and “the ‘utopian’ artisan” were silent resisters of industrial progress was a product, according to E. P. Thompson, of “the enormous condescension of history” to their social class. Writings of the Luddites may be understood as participating in Thompson's project of restoring to view, in Binfield's words, “the existence of a number of English subcultures with constitutive codes of their own.” Herbert Butterfield argued that English society of the Luddite era had become “dangerously diverse” and was only saved from revolution by the encouragement of belief, in all classes and subcultures, in historical progress (“the Whig interpretation of history”). Indeed, an anonymous Luddite letter of 1812 in this collection, addressed to “the principle Magistrate for this District” (Milnsbridge near Huddersfield), avers that “if this Machinery is suffer'd to go on it will probable terminate with a Civil War.”The Luddites lit many fires and destroyed much property in 1811–12, and as I write it is impossible not to think about the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 of this year. But the disaffected intruders of 2021, while contemptuous of science (only a handful wore masks, in a crowd, during a pandemic), clearly adored the technology that “capitalist depredators” had persuaded them they needed to buy. They were all carrying “smartphones,” taking “selfies”—and their leader was in close touch with them on Twitter.