Stop the Machine

In early 1812, a British Army officer named Sir Thomas Maitland faced a peculiar assignment. He had been deployed not to fight Napoleon, not to defend a coastline, but to protect a textile mill in Nottinghamshire from the people who lived nearby.

The mill contained the new wide frames. The people were skilled stocking-frame knitters who had spent years mastering their craft, who had built their identities and their livelihoods around a specific, hard-won expertise, and who had watched that expertise become economically worthless in the space of a few years.

They were angry. They were organized. And on certain nights, under cover of darkness, they broke machines. In Yorkshire, the croppers swung sledges forged by a blacksmith named Enoch, who had also built the frames they fell on – Enoch made them, the men sang, and Enoch shall break them.

We call them Luddites now, and we use the word as an insult. A Luddite is a person who is afraid of technology, who resists progress, who cannot adapt.