Writings of the Luddites (review)

Perhaps more than any other social movement, Luddism epitomizes the complex nexus between technology and culture. Between 1811 and 1817, disparate and apparently unconnected machine-breaking movements appeared in the English Midlands, Lancashire, Cheshire and surrounding areas in the northwest, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Each appearance expressed a different set of social and economic demands, and each reflected the situation of a different occupational group threatened either by the introduction of new machinery or by new production techniques. In the Midlands, framework knitters protested against wide stocking frames; in the northwest, weavers threatened steam-powered looms; and in Yorkshire's West Riding, croppers attacked shearing frames and gig mills.

While the timing and location of Luddism's appearance is a matter of general agreement, its meaning is much more difficult to assess and debates about its significance are much more highly charged. Luddism indeed has become a prism through which each historian's prejudices, predispositions, and political persuasions are refracted. It is, after all, not very difficult to discern the political presuppositions behind E. P. Thompson's famous depiction of the Luddites as "an army of redressers," or, at the other extreme, Malcolm Thomis's description of the limited success of the Nottingham Luddites as a "reign of terror."

The approach offered in this collection of Luddite documents differs markedly from both of these previous treatments. Kevin Binfield, an English professor, applies linguistic and rhetorical analytical techniques to the collection and study of Luddite writings. As a result, this disciplinary leap into a hotly debated historical issue entails both the advantages and disadvantages of a fresh, albeit inexperienced, eye. The great advantage is that it brings together and makes available for the first time the scattered and unusual documents that comprise the bulk of primary evidence surviving from the Luddites. A good portion of the material, as one would expect, is drawn from the correspondence files of the Home Office, but a significant part of the remainder is reproduced from contemporary newspapers and other published sources. Together, this collection represents an invaluable resource for both teachers and scholars.

As with all good collections of documents, this one is tied together by a substantive narrative thread. Binfield quite rightly objects to the "historians' monopoly on Luddism," and his goal as editor is to "give a linguistic and rhetorical face to the Luddites" (p. 7). Luddism, he argues, resists "totalizing" critiques, a term that appears to mean a single overarching interpretation that could satisfactorily explain the movement in all three areas of England. Instead, he suggests that Luddite rhetoric was determined by local circumstances and local experience. Hence it manifested different aims and goals in different regions and therefore drew on different rhetorical heritages. Nonetheless, Luddism was bound together by the act of self-identification: the Luddites' process of naming themselves as followers of General Ludd. Luddites thus constituted themselves as a movement by virtue of a common rhetorical act based on a variety of local experiences.

This argument is neither wrong nor objectionable; it simply does not get us much closer to a deeper understanding of the mentalité of Luddism. Given Binfield's emphasis upon the connection between experience and language, it is both odd and surprising that he appears to be unfamiliar with the seminal work of "postmodern" historians such as Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce, whose work sought to address the critical relationship among language, experience, and identity. These historians drew upon the theory of semiotics to argue that language was nonreferential and constituted its own reality. In Democratic Subjects (1994), Joyce, for example, suggested that stories, myths, narratives, and tropes played an essential role in organizing and interpreting everyday experience and, more importantly, in creating a sense of identity. An engagement with these historiographic and theoretical issues may have contributed significantly not only to our understanding of the discursive heritages within which Luddism operated, but also to our understanding of the world the Luddites themselves created.

This criticism should in no way distract from...