The Machine Breakers (1952 Essay)

Published in February 1952 in the inaugural issue of Past & Present, Eric Hobsbawm's "The Machine Breakers" was barely fifteen pages long, but its analytical precision reshaped labor history. Through close reading of trial records, parliamentary testimony, and contemporary accounts, Hobsbawm demonstrated that the Luddites were not ignorant workers lashing out in fear but skilled artisans conducting a disciplined, targeted campaign against specific deployments of machinery that violated established trade norms. The essay's central distinction—between hostility to machines as such and hostility to their deployment in ways that violated fair dealing—became the foundation of all subsequent serious scholarship on pre-industrial labor resistance and provided the analytical framework E.P. Thompson would extend in The Making of the English Working Class.