At the start of the 1800s, the world was in turmoil. The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the Irish Rebellion. It also saw the Napoleonic Wars which depressed the English clothing trade, leading to poverty and food shortages in the great textile areas of England.

During 1811-13, workers in three English counties collectively fought an aggressive push by employers to mechanise production, with job losses, lower wages and conditions, while replacing apprentices with unskilled labour. Named for a possibly mythical Ned Ludd, the Luddites proclaimed, “We petition no more – that won’t do – fighting must.” The Ludditers combined a politics of revolutionary insurrection, openly associating their cause with the revolts in France, America and Ireland and a local defence of ancient rights and customs that were threatened by privatisation, machinery and enclosure. They wrote their own manifestos arguing that supposedly neutral technological change was, in fact, political, shaped by the push by employers to assert greater management control over work.
Hailed in their time by some as heroes, the term Luddite has more recently been used as an insult, describing a thoughtless, machine-smashing, backward enemy of progress. The Luddite legacy, however, raises many of the issues we face today – what role technology plays, why and how it’s introduced, and what the working class's response should be.