A brief history of Luddism

States ultimately decide how fast technology is adopted

They were led by a man who did not exist. There was no king in England but King Ludd, they said, though sometimes he was a general or a captain. Supposedly he had been a humble apprentice driven to smashing looms by an overbearing master. Now he lived in Sherwood Forest, ancient home of Robin Hood, another legendary champion of the downtrodden. His followers, the Luddites, were textile workers in the north of England. By night they would sneak into mills and smash the stocking frames and mechanical looms which, they said, stole jobs from humans.

“Luddite” has become a slur for technophobic stick-in-the-muds, the whingers who stand in the way of progress and want the clock to be turned back to a better time. The newest descendants of those looms are the artificial-intelligence models that can easily and cheaply perform much white-collar work. Some coders and software engineers worry, like the artisan weavers of northern England, that AI will destroy jobs that once meant creativity and prestige. Even normally sanguine economists have signed a letter saying that governments must “act now” to prevent the widespread loss of work. Ludd Clubs have sprung up on America’s campuses, though most members are more worried about technology’s effect on their social life and attention span than on jobs.

Economists and historians are kinder to the Luddites. The weavers were selective in their smashing, breaking only those machines that made what they perceived to be lower-quality goods. They were not ignorant about the potential benefits of automation. Nor were they the broad-based movement of the destitute that later lefty historians claimed; they were a small bunch of relatively well-off workers, often keen to preserve the demand for skills gained through a long apprenticeship. And it is not clear whether they were right or wrong about the immediate effects of automation. Bob Allen, an economic historian, has suggested that for the early part of the Industrial Revolution most ordinary Britons did not share much in the gains from mechanisation; others, including the late Nick Crafts, have suggested they did. Data from the period are patchy.

Either way, the original Luddites failed. Lord Byron, a poet and adventurer, was a fan and wrote a poem in their honour, but he was an oddball. The state cracked down. Machine-breaking was made a capital crime. Ringleaders who were spared the noose were transported to Australia. The Luddites’ persistence in the popular mind owes more to their theatricality than their economic relevance. On one occasion they dressed in women’s clothes as they smashed machines, calling themselves the wives of Ludd. Imitators followed. In the 1830s British agricultural workers broke threshing machines in the name of Captain Swing and French tailors smashed sewing machines. Prussian weavers rioted in the 1840s. All suffered similar repression.

To find a successful anti-tech workers’ movement, skip forward two centuries and head to India. In 1965 the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India installed an IBM computer in its office in Bombay (now Mumbai). A second was intended for the Calcutta (Kolkata) office, but unions stood in the way. Literally. For two years activists kept up a 24-hour vigil outside, preventing the machine’s installation. The unions won. This time, crucially, the state took the workers’ side rather than the bosses’: in 1969 a new government in West Bengal, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told LIC that no police protection would be provided if they tried to install the machine. It was quietly taken out of the state. By 1972 the Indian government introduced a requirement for a formal union agreement before any computer could be deployed in government or in industry.

Things changed in the 1980s when a youthful prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, backed computerisation. Seeking to avoid confrontation, the Reserve Bank of India relabelled computers as “advanced ledger posting machines” and formed a committee to get them installed (at first, just to clear cheques). That did not stop the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the labour wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu-nationalist organisation, from declaring 1984 the year of anti-computerisation and mounting a sequence of nationwide strikes. Public opinion shifted after Indian Railways introduced a computerised reservation system in 1986. The shortening of ticket queues convinced Indians that the new machines could make their lives better. Unions, too, started to see that the machines did not ultimately spell the end of clerical jobs.

With hatchet, pike and gun

Neither the Luddites nor any of their descendants really prevented the widespread adoption of technology. Britain’s textile industry boomed throughout the early 19th century. Indian clerks’ initial reluctance to embrace computers did not stop the country becoming an IT-services powerhouse (though West Bengal largely missed out, partly thanks to its long dominance by communists).

The truly successful opponents of new technology have not been furious workers but those with the power to regulate it. Some of the looms the Luddites smashed were not new: the stocking frame had been invented 200 years before. (Elizabeth I was said to have forbidden a patent, partly because of worries about unemployment but also because it produced coarse wool stockings rather than the fine silk ones she preferred. However, evidence for this is lacking.) Other technologies have been restricted because of safety concerns: Germany closed its nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy crisis. Others are blocked to help consumers rather than workers: New York state has passed a moratorium on data centres in a bid to hold down electricity prices. The Luddites had the romance and the whiff of doomed tragedy, but ultimately they did not have power. And that is what really matters. ■