Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 6 ·
Luddites, Peterloo and Chartism
Chapter 6 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “Resistance”
Between 1811 and 1813 Luddite stocking knitters, cloth finishers and weavers broke machines in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and the state answered with troops and hangings. Resistance then turned to politics, from the Peterloo meeting in Manchester on 16 August 1819 to the Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s.
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The map above is the world of The Industrial Revolution in Europe, April 1848 — The last Chartist petition.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1850 · Europe in 1850.
Part of IB History: The Industrial Revolution →
SHORT EXPLANATION
Between 1811 and 1813 textile workers attacked machines in three industrial regions: stocking knitters in Nottinghamshire, cloth finishers in Yorkshire and weavers in Lancashire. Their letters invoked an imaginary General Ludd. The movement began at Arnold near Nottingham in March 1811 and reached its peak at Rawfolds Mill in Yorkshire in April 1812. Its targets threatened established trades and wages. Historian Eric Hobsbawm called the tactic collective bargaining by riot: when unions were illegal, damage could pressure employers much as a walkout might prompt negotiations today.
The government treated machine-breaking as a capital crime from 1812; seventeen men were hanged at York in 1813. Six years later perhaps 60,000 gathered peacefully in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform, a wider vote and fairer representation. Cavalry charged the crowd, killing about 18 in the massacre called Peterloo. Protest increasingly turned to political organization.
The map's red arrows follow further movements: farm laborers attacking grain-separating threshing machines in the Swing Riots, moving west from Kent in 1830; Chartists demanding votes for all men and marching on Newport in 1839; and a general strike across industries spreading from Stalybridge in 1842. Resistance seldom stopped the machines. It did help force political changes that later gave workers a voice.
The full story
A stocking knitter in the Midlands rented the frame on which he worked at home. Pay per stocking was falling, and wide frames produced cheap, poorly finished goods. From Arnold on 11 March 1811, knitters broke the frames of employers who paid low rates while sparing those who paid fairly. Their choice of target carried a demand about the terms of work.
Other textile workers faced different machines. Yorkshire croppers finished woolen cloth by hand with heavy shears; shearing frames could do that work with a fraction of the labor. In April 1812 about 150 attacked William Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds, where defenders shot two of them dead. Lancashire hand weavers attacked mills using steam-powered looms. All this happened during war, dear food and trade depression, when the men had neither votes nor legal unions through which to defend their interests.
The authorities answered with exceptional force. Parliament made frame-breaking punishable by death in 1812, and about 12,000 troops occupied the disturbed districts. After a special court at York, seventeen men were hanged in January 1813. Other workers tried petitioning. In 1817 hundreds of Lancashire weavers set out for London carrying blankets, intending to appeal to the Prince Regent, who ruled for his incapacitated father George III. Troops stopped them around Stockport.
On 16 August 1819 perhaps 60,000 people gathered at St Peter's Field in Manchester to hear the orator Henry Hunt demand reform. The yeomanry, part-time cavalry drawn from local property owners, charged, followed by regular cavalry. About 18 people died. Journalists named the massacre Peterloo, a bitter echo of Waterloo, Britain's 1815 victory over Napoleon. The government's Six Acts then restricted meetings and the press. For many radicals, the attack on a peaceful gathering showed why protection depended on a reformed Parliament.
There was another great wave of machine-breaking before mass political organization came to dominate the story. In August 1830 the Swing Riots began at Lower Hardres in Kent. Farm laborers destroyed threshing machines, which separated grain from straw, and sent letters signed by an imaginary Captain Swing. Nineteen were executed and about 480 transported, or shipped as convicts, to Australia.
The Reform Act of 1832 widened representation but gave the vote only to men of property, about one adult man in five. Industrial workers remained excluded. From 1838 Chartists pursued the People's Charter, a six-point program including votes for all men and a secret ballot. Their movement combined petitions with confrontation: in 1839 troops shot dead about 22 armed Chartists marching on Newport. A petition claimed over three million signatures in 1842, and that summer wage cuts during a deep depression helped a general strike spread from Stalybridge across trades in the industrial north. The final petition, launched at Kennington Common in April 1848, was rejected. Chartism failed at the time, but five of its six demands later became law.
FULL EXPLANATION
What the Luddites wanted
Calling someone a Luddite now suggests a simple hatred of machines. The workers of 1811–13 left a more particular record. Midlands knitters attacked the frames of employers cutting rates or making inferior goods. Yorkshire croppers, whose heavy shears finished woolen cloth by hand, attacked machines that displaced their skill. Many workers first petitioned Parliament for protection. Their actions concerned the conditions under which machines were used and the work those machines took away. Historians have reconsidered them since the 1950s. Eric Hobsbawm's “The Machine Breakers” (1952) described machine-breaking as an older means of pressuring employers over wages. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) sought to rescue workers from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. How political was the movement? Thompson suspected a revolutionary underground in Yorkshire; Malcolm Thomis argued in 1970 that it was almost entirely an industrial dispute. Government spies' reports, the main evidence for conspiracy, are unreliable. Adrian Randall found similarly targeted resistance among wool workers in the West Country, England's southwest, in the 1790s. Luddism was one episode in a longer tradition.
The moral economy and the law
A crowd demanding a fair price or wage might understand itself as defending an established right. E. P. Thompson's essay on “the moral economy of the English crowd” (1971) argued that eighteenth-century crowds shared expectations about prices, wages and customary rights, and used riots to enforce them. Early industrial protest drew on that tradition. The law was moving in another direction. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 banned unions; Parliament repealed magistrates' powers to fix wages in 1813 and the apprenticeship rules of the Statute of Artificers, a labor law of 1563, in 1814. Weavers' petitions for a minimum wage were rejected. Appeals to custom encountered a state increasingly backing the free market. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé found a related conflict in Captain Swing (1969), their study of the rural riots of 1830. Laborers demanded higher wages and broke threshing machines, which separated grain from straw and removed winter work. Courts tried nearly 2,000 people, sentenced 252 to death and executed 19. Their aims could defend older expectations even as their methods challenged the law.
Chartism and the making of a working class
The People's Charter gave Chartism, the first national movement of working people anywhere, six concrete demands: votes for all adult men, a secret ballot, equal electoral districts, payment of MPs, abolition of the property qualification for MPs, and annual parliaments. Its petitions gathered about 1.28 million signatures in 1839 and 3.3 million in 1842. The 1848 petition claimed 5.7 million; Commons clerks counted fewer than two million genuine names. What held so large a movement together? Dorothy Thompson's The Chartists (1984) emphasized industrial communities and women's Chartist associations. Gareth Stedman Jones argued in 1983 that its language was mainly political: Chartists blamed hardship on a corrupt, unrepresentative state and said little about class struggle against employers. The movement divided between moral-force leaders who relied on persuasion and physical-force leaders who threatened violence. Imprisonment of leaders, a state able to move troops by railway, and rising prosperity after 1848 also contributed to its failure. Yet five demands became law between 1858 and 1918. Defeat did not prevent Chartism from shaping a later political agenda.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Machines threatened skilled trades. A cropper had served a seven-year apprenticeship to finish woolen cloth by hand; a weaver might have earned a craftsman's wage. Shearing frames threatened the cropper's work, steam-powered looms the weaver's, while wide knitting frames produced sheets cut and sewn into cheap, poorly finished stockings. Employers were cutting rates in a depressed wartime economy. Workers defended training, fair rates and independence as well as their immediate earnings.
War, hunger and depression. The threat of a machine did not by itself determine when protest broke out. War, bad harvests and blocked trade made food expensive and work scarce. During the long war against France, trade with Europe and America was blocked and unemployment rose as Luddites attacked machines in 1811–13. After the war, the Corn Law of 1815 protected landowners' rents by barring foreign wheat until British prices were high, keeping bread dear. Protest peaked in the hard years of 1811–12, 1816–19, 1830 and 1842.
Laws that silenced workers. Working men lacked votes, and the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made unions illegal until 1824. Parliament also repealed laws fixing wages and protecting apprenticeships. Weavers petitioned for a minimum wage in 1808 and 1811 and were refused. With lawful bargaining and political change so difficult, direct action could appear the only means left.
Reformers gave anger a programme. The journalist William Cobbett and the orator Henry Hunt offered a political explanation for hardship: a corrupt Parliament elected by a small minority. They argued for reform of the vote. Cheap newspapers, reading rooms and mass meetings spread that argument through industrial districts. By the 1830s the People's Charter gave local grievances a national six-point program beginning with votes for all men. Political reform promised a remedy beyond what machine-breaking could achieve.
THE TURNING POINT
Peterloo, 16 August 1819. The crowd at St Peter's Field in Manchester came peacefully to demand the vote. Perhaps 60,000 attended, many marching in disciplined ranks behind banners; the authorities answered with sabers. About 18 died and hundreds were wounded. Peterloo became a founding memory of working-class radicalism and discredited the government among many middle-class observers. The Six Acts that followed restricted public meetings and the radical press, showing how readily peaceful protest could be suppressed. The struggle increasingly centered on who could speak through Parliament.
What it changed
Reform reaches the middle classes first. In 1832 the Reform Act gave Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds their own MPs and enfranchised many middle-class men. Industrial wealth gained representation before industrial labor: almost all workers remained excluded, a betrayal that fed Chartism's demand for votes for all men. Many urban working householders gained the vote in 1867, and many county householders in 1884, after further organized pressure.
Trade unions become lawful. Repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824–25 allowed unions to grow in skilled trades, but legal protection came slowly. In 1834 six Dorset laborers from Tolpuddle were transported, shipped as convicts to Australia, for swearing a union oath. By the 1870s British unions had secure legal standing. Organization once treated as a crime had become part of industrial society's institutions.
Resistance spreads with industry. Industrial resistance appeared elsewhere in different settings. Lyon's silk weavers rose in 1831 and 1834; Silesian linen weavers rose in 1844. Later, textile workers in Japan and India struck against long hours and wage cuts. British protest was the first of many such movements, with states answering through force and reform.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Were the Luddites enemies of progress, or rational defenders of their livelihoods?
The Luddites had reasons to defend their livelihoods. In 1811–13 knitters broke the frames of low-paying employers while sparing others, and croppers attacked mills installing the shearing frames that threatened their hand-finishing work. Wages were falling, food was dear and unions were illegal. Damage gave workers a way to pressure employers; Eric Hobsbawm called it collective bargaining by riot, while E. P. Thompson defended them against the condescension of later historians. The modern label for someone who fears technology misses that targeted action. They could not stop technical change. Machines eventually made cloth and stockings much cheaper for everyone, including workers. Yet those who lost their trades bore costs while many benefits went to others and later generations. Their struggle raises a question that outlasted the machines they broke: how should a society share the costs of technological change?
An interesting fact
On 27 February 1812 Lord Byron made his first speech in the House of Lords against a bill making frame-breaking—the smashing of knitting frames—a capital crime. He had seen the distress of Nottinghamshire knitters near his family's estate at Newstead Abbey. Hunger drove them to break frames, he told the Lords, and the law would not feed them. The bill passed. In 1816 his “Song for the Luddites” imagined weavers exchanging their looms' shuttles for swords. Few parliamentary voices spoke for the frame-breakers; men without votes had little reason to expect a hearing from lawmakers.
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