Writings of the Luddites (review)

On the whole this volume offers more than its title suggests. Kevin Binfield has collected and annotated a wide array of texts concerning not only the specific activities of the Luddites but also the wider economic and political contention of the 1810s. He takes as his purpose the "textual recovery" of working peoples' rhetorical strategies from the Luddite era. To do this, he has thoroughly scoured national, county, and city archives, local newspapers, collections of several major businesses and capitalists, and an important magistrate. Binfield is acutely aware that these gleanings are haphazard and selective, offering an uncertain pastiche of past voices of disaffection and resistance.

Binfield carefully characterizes the collection as a plurality of period discourses from local resistances that were contiguous and partly overlapping in their rhetorical styles but always contextually grounded. He categorizes the collection both geographically—in its Midlands, Northeastern, and Yorkshire manifestations—and by discursive emphasis—calls for redress by authorities, economic analyses often predicated on a moral economy or customary trade rights, or larger political analyses through contemporary radicalisms. Throughout the editor's introduction and the collection Binfield emphasizes the ways in which Luddite writers selectively appropriated a variety of contemporary discourses to fashion their voices of resistance.

The editor's almost seventy-page introduction opens with a useful review of the historiography, providing a brief chronological overview of all major works. Readers familiar with these writings will find this a useful refresher, but those new to the topic will want to consult to some of the major scholars surveyed. Binfield then turns to detailed discussions of the three regional subcultures of resistance, reflections that are further explored in the chapter introductions for each region and in his annotations. In the Midland texts of the framework knitters, he finds resistance to new forms of stocking frames and the organization of production based in rhetorics of custom and the rights of the original trade charter. Among the Northwest handloom weavers, Binfield discerns a group less steeped in customary rights and more community pleas to authority (petitioning), moral economic critiques of an emergent capitalist order, and a nascent popular radicalism. Finally, with the Yorkshire cloth dressers' sustained and spirited defense against new machinery, Binfield charts a course from an initial focus on threats to their economic independence to a more encompassing political Jacobinism. Throughout, Binfield examines these discourses as overlapping (and sometimes shared) but contextually distinct products of resistance.

The volume is a broad-ranging selection of texts offered up by region. Binfield's wide net collects a variety of texts that some historians would find beyond the pale of Luddism in its narrow sense, and that is one of this collection's signal virtues. Providing careful annotations for each text, he demonstrates how threatening letters, polemic poems, respectful petitions, piquant critiques of an industrializing capitalism, and radical diatribes for revolt cohere in an integument of rhetorical resistance. Binfield's artful contextualization demonstrates how the rough scrawlings of anonymous threats and highly literate political critiques connect in wider contentious subcultures. The book far outstrips older, more general (and often hard to find) documentary collections of nineteenth-century economic and political conflict.

In a sense this work shines not just as a collection on an important historical topic but more generally as an artisanal guide to the art and mystery of archival research. Any student of history, with a bit of background, would do well to read this volume before trundling off for his or her first encounter with often inscrutable repositories. Binfield's collection is a just-so account of how to create coherence out of selective and sundry remnants, while all the while remaining aware of the gaps and silences of these gleanings and the partiality of one's conclusions.

A curious and significant lacuna of this work is the absence of any engagement with the last twenty years of historiographical controversies on nineteenth-century English class and radical political and economic discourses. The social lineage...