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The Twelve Thousand Soldiers
The British military deployment to the Midlands in 1811–1812—larger than Wellington's force in the Peninsula—whose scale confirmed that the state understood the Luddite movement as a political challenge rather than mere vandalism.
In the winter of 1811 and into 1812, the British state deployed approximately twelve thousand troops to the textile counties of the English Midlands—a force larger than the one the Duke of Wellington commanded at that moment on the Iberian Peninsula, where he was fighting Napoleon. The troops were not aimed at a foreign army. They were aimed at framework knitters in Nottinghamshire, croppers in Yorkshire, and handloom weavers in Lancashire who had begun, under cover of darkness and with remarkable organizational discipline, to break machines. The scale of the deployment—disproportionate to any merely criminal threat—confirms Hobsbawm's analysis that the British state understood the Luddite movement as an organized political challenge to the terms on which new technology would be deployed. The same deployment, considered as a political signal, provides the analytical template for reading contemporary cultural deployments against AI resistance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The scale of the deployment becomes meaningful when placed in