General Ludd's Rage Against the Machines
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The year is 1812. A Saturday night in April, just gone midnight. The mill owner's dog begins to growl. All at once, Cartwright is alert. He isn't sure yet if this is the trouble he's been expecting for weeks. He's posted two guards outside the yard and he had assumed they'd be the first to raise the alarm.

They haven't. And now the growling turns to barking. Cartwright springs out of bed. He wakes the other nine men who are sleeping in the mill.

Four of his workers and five soldiers borrowed from a local regiment. No time to put on clothes, the men pick up their guns. Outside, the gates of the yard are being battered off their hinges. Cartwright's men are on the upper floor of the mill. They point their guns through holes that have been made in the thick stone walls. They may listen and wait.

From outside, the sound of trampling feet and murmured voices. Then another crash, this time of glass. A volley of rocks smashing through the ground floor windows. An almighty yell and the firing of pistols and muskets. The men in the mill open fire in return. Down beneath them, the door to the mill shudders under blow after blow from hatchets, massive hammers.

A voice from outside urges on the men attacking the door. "In with you, lads. Damn them. Kill them, every one." Cartwright has prepared for this. He's about to find out how well.

He's had the mill's wooden door reinforced with iron studs and bars. If the attackers do manage to force it in, they'll find themselves on the lower floor, and Cartwright's men will then be able to shoot at them from above through gaps he's made in the stonework, separating the upper and lower floors. If the attackers try to get up the stairs, they'll find that Cartwright has installed a fearsome roll of 18-inch spikes.

If they get past that, he's got a barrel of sulfuric acid he can tip on top of them. But anyway, the door's holding. For now. And Cartwright's men are reloading and firing their weapons through those little holes in the wall. At least, most of them are. One of the soldiers Cartwright's borrowed doesn't appear to be doing much. Just turning his gun over in his hand. What's wrong? asks Cartwright. Is your gun faulty? No, says the soldier.

Then why aren't you firing? I might hit some of my brothers. And who are these brothers? The men attacking the mill, the men the soldier is reluctant to hurt. Are they robbers, looking to steal the mill owner's money? Not at all. They're followers of a mysterious individual called General Ned Ludd. Or more simply, they're Luddites. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. MUSIC

Today, Luddite is a term of mockery. What you'd laughingly say about a boomer who hasn't figured out how to listen to a podcast yet. A description for someone who's scared of technology, who doesn't know how to use it, doesn't appreciate what it can do for them.

But in 1812, in Yorkshire, Luddism was no laughing matter for the likes of William Cartwright. Three years before, Cartwright had brought new machinery into his mill. He wanted to automate a job that was hard and slow for humans. Cropping, as it was called. When cloth is made, it's rough and uneven. The cropper uses shears to make it smooth. It's a delicate task.

It takes real skill to lift the rough cloth and wield the shears to get a beautiful finish. It's also painful, at least to start with. The handles of the shears dig into the wrist. In time, the skin on the wrist gets hard and calloused. You can tell if someone's a cropper with a glance at their wrist. Because the job is hard and skilled, it pays well. Young men push through that initial pain with the prospect of a gainful career.

Cropping is a high-status profession in working communities. It's also recently become unnecessary, because machines called gig mills and shearing frames can do the job just as well, and far more quickly, as William Cartwright is making all too clear. Cartwright's not the only mill owner who's brought in these new machines, but he's one of the few who's daring still to use them in the spring of 1812.

Most other local mill owners have been intimidated by letters signed by General Ludd. Dismantle the machines or we'll smash them up. It's no idle threat. If the machines stay in use, masked gangs come in the dead of night. They use hatchets to break in the door and great hammers to smash the machines. Working people argued about whether or not this would all backfire.

Let's rewind to March 1812, a month before the attack on Cartwright's Mill. In a cropping shop, a group of men are talking after work. Our account of this conversation comes from a 19th century historian called Frank Peel, who years later recorded the stories that local people handed down.

Most of those Peel describes talking are croppers and committed followers of the shadowy figure they call General Ludd. One is not. John Booth is 19 years old, an apprentice saddle maker, the son of a clergyman with the Church of England. Would it not be better, asks Booth, to reason with them rather than infuriate them by destroying their machines? Reason with them? You might as well reason with a stone.

Booth's friend, the cropper George Mellor, is the local leader of those masked marauding gangs. Mellor is still working, for now, but he's well aware that he can't compete with water-powered gig mills and shearing frames. He and his fellow croppers can see that the skill they've spent years perfecting is soon to be rendered worthless. It's all right for John Booth. He's not a cropper. He's a saddle-maker. And there isn't a saddle-making machine...

Not yet, anyway. These machines aren't taking Booth's trade out of his fingers, says Mellor, or he'd happen to see things in a different light. But young Booth has thought this through, and he argues back. Being a cropper is hard work, he points out. It's painful, too, until you develop that hard calloused skin on the wrist. And have you seen those machines in action? You just have to set up the cloth and keep an eye on them.

They take away all of that hard, painful work. Seen like that, the machinery is a thing of beauty. "I quite agree with you," says Booth, respecting the harm you suffer from machinery. But it might be man's chief blessing instead of his curse, if society was differently constituted. "You can't say the machine itself is evil," says Booth. "That's absurd. No, the problem is that the mill owner gets all the benefits."

If those benefits were fairly shared out, if, if, if, George Mellor is not impressed. What's the use of such sermons as thine to starving men? Starving is not just a figure of speech.

Another man joins in the conversation. He tells how he went to see a former workmate, a cropper who'd lost his job. He can't find other work. There's a war on with Napoleon's France. It's disrupted trade. Nobody's hiring. And the price of food has shot up. The man's been struggling to afford to eat. And now his wife has died. There she lay on the bed. Poor thing, skin and bone. Now tell us, he told his fellows.

It's hard for John Booth to argue with that. He knows he's right. The machines would be a blessing if society were differently constituted. But he knows his friends are right too. It isn't much comfort to conceive of a different world if you're starving to death in this one. To confess the truth, says Booth, I don't see much chance of reorganising society on a better and sounder basis at present. I know not what to say. Say you'll join us, says Mellor.

What to do? Booth doubts that smashing machines will achieve anything. But it's not like he has a better plan. And who knows? Maybe he's wrong. Maybe drastic action will make people sit up and take notice of how desperate the workers are. All right, says Booth. I'm in. Mellor wants to decide on their next target.

In the last few weeks, they've had success after success around the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. They've smashed up some machines and sent threatening letters to the owners of other machines, and almost everyone has agreed to go back to the old ways of cropping by hand. A local magistrate is even recommending they do so, for their own safety.

But two local mill owners have been loudly and publicly holding out. One is William Cartwright. He's got nothing but contempt for his peers who are taking down their shearing frames. Pusillanimous, he calls them. Instead, he's fortified his mill. He's brought in soldiers from a local regiment. He's taken to sleeping in his mill with the soldiers every night.

The other local holdout is William Horsfall. He's gone even further than Cartwright. He's installed a cannon in his mill. "Just let the Luddites try to smash up his machines," he says to anyone who'll listen. "I'll ride up to my saddle girths in Luddite blood if the Yorkshire croppers are to win their battle against the new machines." The two Williams, Cartwright and Horsfall, need to be taught a lesson.

Whose mill should they attack first? They flip a coin. It's Cartwright. None of them know it. But this time, the attack will determine who lives and who dies. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up.

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In his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, the historian E.P. Thompson sees the roots of Luddism in a failure of politics. For years, he says, organisations of workers had been sending representatives to London with policy proposals, such as a tax of sixpence a yard on cloth made by machines, that money to go into a fund to support displaced workers.

But these ideas went against the mood of the day, which was a sudden passion for laissez-faire economics. Politicians were busy abolishing restrictions on what workers and factories could and couldn't do. Those old laws, said Thompson, were often bad for workers. But still, somewhere within them was the shadowy image of a benevolent corporate state. There'd always been an ethos of paternalism.

The idea that those higher up in the social order had some kind of obligation to those below. Workers might be low down the order, but they had a place. The new ideal was to free up markets. If machines and unskilled workers could do things more cheaply than skilled artisans, the artisans were simply out of luck. No redundancy pay, no unemployment benefit, no programs to help them re-skill and learn another trade.

Ludism, writes Thompson, appeared with an almost inevitable logic. To the croppers, Ned Lud was the defender of an ancient right, the upholder of a lost constitution. And who exactly was this mysterious Ned Lud? He was from Nottingham, a town in the English Midlands that was famous for its stocking industry.

and for its centuries-old stories about another popular outlaw who was feared by the bad and loved by the good. Chant no more old rhymes about bold Robin Hood. His feats I but little admire. I will sing the achievements of general love. Now the hero of Nottinghamshire. Robin Hood was mythical.

So was General Ludd. He was based on a well-known local story about a man called Ned Ludd, supposedly a young stocking maker who once smashed up his stocking frame in a fit of rage. In 1811, when masked gangs started to smash up stocking frames in Nottingham at night, people joked that Ned Ludd must have done it.

The gangs picked up the joke and ran with it. They called themselves an army and imagined Ned Ludd as their general. When their leaders sent threatening letters, they signed them General Ludd. Newspapers reported breathlessly about the exploits of the Nottingham Luddites. They inspired workers in other industries in other parts of England, such as the croppers in Yorkshire. The government responded with a legal clampdown.

It was hard to get anyone to testify against the masked machine smashers. As one magistrate complained, almost every creature of the lower order is on their side. So they sent out spies and offered money to tempt informers. And they rushed through new legislation. Smashing machines could now be punished with the death penalty.

On the night of 11th April 1812, around 150 men leave their homes and make their way to a quiet country lane, three miles from William Cartwright's mill. They wear masks or blackened faces. They sort themselves by weapon. Some have got hold of muskets or pistols. Others have hatchets or hammers or bludgeons. George Mellor gives them a pep talk.

Cartwright's boasted, he reminds them, that he'll defend his mill. But we're well armed and we shall handle him. You know what to do. They march the three miles to Cartwright's mill and stop just short of the gates. There'll be two guards outside, they know. A few of the men sneak up on them, grab them and muffle their cries.

The hatchet men advance on the gates and batter them inwards. The men swarm into the yard. They hurl rocks through the mill's windows, and with a yell, the men with guns open fire through the shattered glass. But then there's gunfire back from inside the mill. Hatchet men, to the front, cries Mellon.

The hatchets rain down on the mill's wooden door. But it's so well reinforced, they're mostly hitting iron. Sparks are flying. All around George Mellor, his men are crying out in pain as bullets find them. And now someone sounded an alarm, calling for reinforcements from a regiment nearby. How long will it take them to arrive? Shoot at the bell! Damn that bell! Mellor yells, get it lads!

The bell stops ringing, but not for long. They've shot through the rope that Cartwright's man was pulling, but Cartwright has simply sent the man up onto the roof to ring the bell by hand. They can't have long before the soldiers get there, and the door's still holding. Is there another way in? To the back, lads, Mellor commands. Some of the attackers try to find their way round the back of the mill, but the river runs right next to it.

One slips and falls in. The others stop and scramble to help him out. For now, there's no alternative. It all depends on getting that door down fast. And suddenly, there's a breakthrough. A hole in the wood of the door, about the size of a man's head. In with your lads! Damn them! Kill them, everyone!

The men surge at the door, but still it holds. And the soldiers in the mill start to shoot through the hole. Someone cries out and falls to the ground, holding his leg. It's 19-year-old apprentice saddle maker, John Booth. He never did think this attack on the mill was a good idea. And now the attackers with muskets and pistols have run out of ammunition. If they do get in, what then?

The bell's still ringing. Can't have long before more soldiers get there. The attackers start to fall back. It's clear that they've failed. "Spit up, lads! Get home as quick as you can!" Two men can't get home. John Booth's leg is shattered. Another man's been shot in the chest. He's lying on the ground, struggling for breath. Mella has no choice but to leave them. Inside the mill, silence falls.

Except for the moans of the injured men in the yard outside. Cartwright checks on his workers and borrowed soldiers. Not one has been hurt. The defence he'd planned so carefully has worked exactly as intended. Except, of course, for that soldier who refused to shoot. They'll deal with him later. What to do about the injured attackers? It might be a trap.

I'm not opening that door, says Cartwright, until the reinforcements arrive. Soon they do, and so do other local people. They gather round the two injured men. John Booth is writhing in agony, blood gushing from his leg. The other man is choking on the blood from his chest wound. Help me breathe, he says. Lift up my head. Cartwright opens the mill's door and strides over.

He recognises the man who's been shot in the chest. The man used to work for him as a cropper before the machines came in. If you want us to help you, says Cartwright, tell me who's your leader. One of the locals decides to ignore Cartwright. He lifts the head of the wounded man. Another puts a glass of water to his lips. The growing crowd murmur their approval. And Cartwright understands that he isn't out of danger yet.

Take the two men to the inn, he says. We'll care for them there, but both men die. It's later rumoured they were tortured to try to get them to give up the names of the local Luddite leaders. John Booth's supposed last words become legend. He calls over the priest, a well-known friend of Cartwright. Can you keep a secret? he asks. I can, says the priest. So can I, says John Booth.

Thousands of people gather for John Booth's funeral. On the doors of local houses, a message is chalked. Vengeance for the blood of the innocent. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Economists have coined the phrase 'Luddite fallacy' to describe the mistaken belief that technological progress is bad for working people. It's bad for particular workers, to be sure. Machines do displace certain jobs. But the story of economic progress is that new jobs have always come along to replace them. And those new jobs have tended to be more productive and better paid.

The problem is that those better jobs don't necessarily appear straight away. In their book, Power and Progress, the economists Darren Asimoglu and Simon Johnson describe how it took a century for the inventions of the Industrial Revolution to translate into higher wages and improved working conditions for ordinary people.

The new machines created wealth quickly, but that wealth accrued to their owners, people like William Cartwright. This had happened before, say, Acemoglu and Johnson. In medieval Europe, advances in agriculture created new wealth that funded magnificent cathedrals, but didn't improve the lives of peasants at all. And it's happening again now, they say.

Digital technologies are giving us new billionaires. But shared prosperity? Not so much. In many rich countries, wages for typical workers have been growing much more slowly than in the 1950s and 1960s, if they've been growing at all.

Perhaps then we can sympathise with the Luddite croppers. They were facing all the immediate costs of new technology, while the uncertain benefits lay decades in the future. No wonder some risked an early death to try to prolong the status quo.

Even some wealthy aristocrats sympathised at the time, such as the poet Lord Byron, who spoke out against the government's bill to bring in the death penalty for machine-breaking. The excesses of the Luddites, said Byron, however to be deplored and condemned can hardly be a matter of surprise. A week after the attack on his mill, William Cartwright rides to the town of Huddersfield.

He has to give evidence at the court-martial of the soldier who had refused to shoot at the Luddite attackers. The regiment's commanders greet him warmly. It's not easy for the army to deal with the Luddites, they say, when the mill owners keep giving in to them. What a pleasure it is to find a man who'll fight to defend his property and the law.

Another local mill owner congratulates Cartwright too, William Horsfall, the man who'd installed a cannon at his mill and said he'd ride up to his saddle girths in Luddite blood. The court-martial is over quickly. Cartwright gives his evidence, the soldier makes no defence, the sentence is passed. 300 lashes.

300. Cartwright mounts his horse again to ride the eight miles home. As he passes a woodland, a pistol fires from behind a tree. The bullet flies past him. His horse rears and bolts. Another shot rings out. Another miss. Cartwright gallops home. There he finds, to his horror, that the soldier's punishment is going to happen right outside his mill.

A crowd of hundreds gather to watch as the soldier's hands are tied. His back is bared. After just a few lashes, the skin is broken. Soon the whip is cutting raw flesh and the crowd is getting restive. Cartwright pushes through them and speaks to the officer in command. Enough now, he says. Can't we leave it at that? The officer ignores him. Carry on, he says to the man with the whip.

Another lash, another, and another, but only 20 lashes in. It's clear the soldier will die long before 300. In fact, he seems to have passed out already. A doctor checks his pulse and nods to the officer in command. The lashing resumes. People cry out and jostle forward. The crowd seems on the verge of a riot.

Cartwright tries again. Stop now. You have to stop. Cartwright must sense he's pleading for his own life as much as for that of the soldier. And perhaps the officer understands. Because this time, he nods. The soldier's hands are untied and he's led away. The crowd calms down. William Cartwright breathes again. He's narrowly escaped being shot and then being lynched.

You might expect his fellow mill owner, William Horsfall, to decide to keep a low profile for a while. Not a bit of it. Horsfall keeps loudly denouncing the Luddites. Every week, Horsfall rides into Huddersfield on business. His routine is well known. At six o'clock, he sets off for home. He never rides quickly. And then, as he passes a woodland...

An unseen marksman takes aim. A bullet rips into Horsefull's flesh. He slumps forward and grabs onto his horse's neck. Blood starts spurting from his leg. Horsefull falls off his horse. Passers-by help him back to the inn and call a doctor. Horsefull has been shot in the stomach and thigh. One bullet has cut an artery. He's bleeding profusely.

What's your opinion, Doctor? asked the injured man. Indeed, Mr Horsfall, I consider you in a very dangerous state. These are awful times, Doctor. Horsfall dies soon after. News of his death gets back to the cropping shop where George Mellor works. It comes with other news too. A reward of £2,000 for information about the assassin. A fortune, Doctor.

George Mellor knows very well who shot William Horsfall, and he knows that all his friends know it too. If I thought, says Mellor, there was one man who would whisper a single word, this day would be his last. It's hard, as I said, not to feel some sympathy with the Luddite croppers. But then...

I find it hard not to sympathise with the mill owners too. William Cartwright and William Horsfall were stubborn, but they weren't bad men. They were seen as fair employers. Their workers liked them. Yet Cartwright and Horsfall could hardly ignore the fact that new machines could finish cloth more cheaply than human workers.

If they didn't use those new machines, someone somewhere would, and they'd soon be out-competed. Both the croppers and the mill owners were trapped by the same economic system. The parallels with today's economic system are all too obvious. Skilled workers in high-status jobs find that robots or algorithms can do their work as well as they can, or well enough and much more quickly.

Technologists may have some qualms about the impacts of the tech they're developing, but they tell themselves, if I don't do it, someone else will. The author Brian Merchant explores these parallels in his new book, Blood in the Machine. Think about policy proposals to respond to the rise of big tech, he says, such as a robot tax or a universal basic income.

Such ideas seem new, but they're in the same tradition as those old proposals for a tax on cloth made by machine to keep the unemployed croppers from starvation. Those old proposals failed.

In their book, Power and Progress, the economists Darren Asimoglu and Simon Johnson ask why it took so long for the wealth-creating machines of the industrial revolution to benefit people more widely through higher wages, better working conditions or social safety nets. Their answer?

It happened only when workers and citizens found new ways to organise, through trade unions and political parties, to force the gains from technological progress to be more equitably shared. Today, they argue, we need to do the same again. The thought of a £2,000 reward proved too much for one of George Mellor's fellow croppers.

Mellor was arrested, tried and convicted of the murder of William Horsfall. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Five other men were condemned to be hanged too, not for killing anyone, but for their part in the attack on William Cartwright's mill. The crackdown worked. As the historian E.P. Thompson puts it, Luddism ended on the scaffold.

In January 1813, Mellor stood on a wooden platform, a rope around his neck. Some of my enemies may be here, said Mellor. If there be, I freely forgive them and all the world, and I hope the world will forgive me. Luddism ended on the scaffold. But the words of the young apprentice saddle maker, John Booth, live on.

New machines might be man's chief blessing instead of his curse if society was differently constituted. Quite so. But George Mellor's response also echoes down the years. If, if, if. For a list of the sources used in this episode, please see the show notes at timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslow. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Leet Almalad, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori and Eric Sandler.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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