Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

Company, empowering it to inspect competing goods and destroy them if they had been manufactured shoddily or deceitfully. Although the royal charter had long fallen into disuse, the knitters invoked it in an 1812 declaration, claiming it gave them the right to “break and destroy” any frames that made cheap knock-offs or that belonged to hosiers who did “not pay the regular price heretofore agreed to by the Masters and Workmen.”18

In March 1811 a crowd of knitters in the market town of Arnold broke into some workshops and smashed dozens of wide frames. Eight months later, in the town of Bulwell, knitters led by a fellow calling himself Ned Ludd attacked the house of a merchant-hosier named Edward Hollingsworth, who owned a large number of the loathed wide frames. Hollingsworth tried to defend his property. During the melee, a knitter named John Westley was shot dead, making him the first fatality of the Luddite protests.

Initially, some members of Britain’s ruling class expressed sympathy for the protesters. “The high price of every thing necessary for their subsistence presses now still heavier upon these poor people,” the Duke of Newcastle, who was serving as the lord lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, wrote to Richard Ryder, the home secretary. “I hope we may be able by some means to relieve them.”19 Other authority figures were much less sympathetic. George Coldham, the town clerk of Nottingham, who was also a leading figure in the Hosiers’ Association, a local trade group, pleaded with Ryder to crush the protests with force before they spread further. “If the People are once taught that they can accomplish the objects of their wishes by a system of Terror,” Coldham wrote, “I feel assured that they will proceed further than breaking Frames and it is Difficult to say who may be the next Objects of their Vengeance.”20

In the woolen textile industry, the resistance to new methods of production was led by the croppers. Like the protesters at Liversedge, some of them worked in the mills. Others were employed in specialized workshops, which took in unfinished cloth and processed it for final sale. In both cases the croppers were well paid and highly independent. “The Cropper strictly speaking is not a servant,” an 1803 article in the Leeds Mercury noted. “He does not feel, or call himself as such, but a clothworker, and partakes much more of the nature of a shoe-maker, joiner, taylor, &c.… Like them, he comes and goes, stops a longer, or a shorter time … according as he may chance to have work.”21

During the 1790s, the merchant-manufacturers of Leeds had announced their intention to introduce new machines—shearing frames and gig mills— that automated some of the tasks carried out by the croppers, but the hostile reaction forced them to postpone their plans.22 Still, the new technology represented an ongoing threat to the croppers. In trying to prevent the deployment of the new machines, they, like the stocking knitters, appealed to ancient precedent—a ban on early prototypes of gig mills, which King Edward VI had introduced in 1551. Some members of Parliament at Westminster were sympathetic to the knitters’ plight, but the legislature ultimately took the side of the mill owners. In 1809 it repealed all prior legislation that had regulated the introduction of gig mills and shearing frames.23

Faced with a hostile state, the West Riding croppers took their resistance underground, creating secret societies and reciting oaths of loyalty. It wasn’t until after machine-breaking attacks broke out in the Midlands that they engaged in violence. In January 1812, someone set on fire a Leeds finishing mill that was using gig mills. The disturbances quickly spread to Halifax and Huddersfield, two sizable towns, and to the Spen Valley, where the abortive assault on Rawfolds Mill was followed by further exercises in intimidation. One mill owner in Huddersfield received a letter from “General Ludd” that read: “Information has just been given in that you are a holder of those detestable Shearing Frames … If they are not taken down by the end of next Week, I will detach one of my Lieutenants with at least 300 Men to destroy them … and if you have [the] Impudence to fire upon any of my Men, they have orders to murder you, & burn all your Housing.”24 In Leeds, Benjamin Gott, whom the croppers fiercely disliked, received an anonymous note that said: “No doubt you are Informd as to the proceedins of the Ludites  … Be Carful of your Self for a few Weeks—alter your usal walks to your Business.”25

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Threats like these were more often issued than carried out. But between 1811 and 1813, there was unrest in many parts of northern England. In

Lancashire, it centered on the handloom weavers—men, women, and children who wove cotton yarn into cloth on wooden handlooms, often in their own homes. Ironically, the early stages of industrialization had been a boon to the weavers. The new spinning machines invented by Arkwright, James Hargreaves, and others greatly increased the British cotton industry’s capacity to produce yarn. Because the intricate process of weaving yarn into cloth for decades proved too complicated to mechanize, the demand for the labor of handloom weavers increased sharply. Between 1780 and 1812, the number of handlooms more than quadrupled, from 37,000 to 208,000.26

Most weavers were paid piece rates, which rewarded them for producing more. Until about 1800, they appear to have enjoyed rising incomes. Many weavers lived in cottages that had workshops, and handlooms, on the second floor, where the light was best. One contemporary described these “dwellings and small gardens” as “clean and neat—all the family well clad—the men with each a watch in his pocket, and the women dressed to their own fancy.”27

The weavers’ reprieve from the rigors of industrial capitalism was only temporary. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright, an inventor from Nottinghamshire who was also a cleric, patented a crude weaving machine, or loom, that could be powered by water or steam. Cartwright worked to improve his invention, obtaining a final patent in 1792. The new machine didn’t take off immediately—it wasn’t easy to use and required more tinkering—but during the early nineteenth century, some Lancashire mill owners started to employ power looms in significant numbers. This development, together with a slump in the global demand for textiles during the Napoleonic Wars, caused weavers’ incomes to fall sharply. According to one estimate, between 1804 and 1810 their wages fell by more than 40 percent.28

Initially, the weavers reacted to this hardship peacefully. Under the repressive Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, forming labor unions, or other types of workers’ associations, was illegal. Even without any formal organization, though, the weavers gathered about 130,000 signatures for a petition demanding the introduction of a minimum wage, which they submitted to the House of Commons. In May 1808 Parliament rejected the petition, provoking an immediate response. In cotton towns across Lancashire, there were strikes and riots. During one of these protests, the Rochdale jail was burned down. The weavers, like the croppers, took their resistance underground, forming clandestine committees and swearing secret oaths. There was sporadic violence, but nothing on a large scale until March 1812, a month before the attack on Rawfolds Mill, when, in Stockport, a town just east of Manchester, unknown attackers set alight a factory-cum-warehouse whose owner, William Radcliffe, had introduced power looms.29

The following month a crowd of thousands attacked a mill containing power looms at Middleton, just north of Manchester. “Vollies of stones were thrown, and the windows smashed to atoms; the internal part of the building being guarded, a musket was discharged in the hope of intimidating and dispersing the assailants,” the Manchester Gazette reported.30 “In a very short time the effects were too shockingly seen in the death of three, and it is said, about ten wounded.” The following day a crowd of protesters returned to the Middleton mill. After failing to gain entry, they burned down the house of its owner, Daniel Burton. Military units confronted the rioters. In the ensuing violence, at least seven more people were killed.31

The Luddite protests fused with more generalized discontent about the depressed wartime economy and the rising cost of living, which was driving many workers to near starvation. During the spring and summer of 1812, food riots broke out in towns and cities across northern England, including Leeds, Sheffield, and Carlisle. In the middle of April, a Stockport mill that used power looms was burned down, and a second mill, which used new machines to dress the woven yarn, was threatened. Its owner, Thomas Garside, received an anonymous letter, signed “General Justice,” that threatened to burn down his factory if he didn’t remove the new machinery. “Remember We have given you fare Warning and if your factory is Burn, it is your own fault,” the letter said. “It is Not our Desire to doo you the Least Injury But We are fully Determined to Destroy Both Dressing Machines and Steam Looms.”32

Messages like this one confirm that the primary target of the Luddites was the industrial system rather than individual factory owners. The machine breakers may have lacked formal education, but they understood how industrial capitalism was affecting them and the fact that they couldn’t rely on the government or any other powerful institutions to protect them. In some cases, the Luddites extended their threats to businesses that were helping to support the factory owners. In the town of Wigan, near Manchester, an anonymous correspondent calling himself Falstaff addressed a letter to a fire insurance company, in which he invoked the name of “General Ludds” and demanded that the firm cease insuring any business owner “who keeps winding machines or any other such like things in their Employment.” The letter writer identified a number of other businesses whose premises “will be looked into in short time if they continue in said way of Robbing the Poor of their Bread.”33

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Lacking formal organization and confronted by a ruling elite that didn’t hesitate to employ state violence, the Luddites were fighting for a cause that was largely, but not entirely, hopeless. For a time, the stocking knitters of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire did manage to prevent the spread of cheap “cut-ups,” and the price of stockings rose, although only temporarily. Elsewhere, the designation of machine breaking as a capital offense, followed by the trials and executions of 1813, had the deterrent effect that the authorities intended. The number of attacks on factories declined sharply, even as the trends that had given rise to them accelerated. Mechanization and the drive to cut costs continued to undermine the economic position of the stockingers and croppers; the weavers had it worst of all. Their wages, after rebounding for a few years between 1810 and 1815, went into another long, and this time irreversible, decline. By 1820, weekly wage levels were about 60 percent below their level of twenty years earlier, and by 1830 the decline had reached about 80 percent.34 Parliamentary reports from the 1820s and ’30s are replete with harrowing descriptions of weavers dressed in rags and struggling to feed themselves and their families.

One witness to a select committee recounted visiting a starving family in the small town of Westhoughton, northwest of Manchester: “We there found on one side of the fire a very old man, apparently dying, on the other side a young man about eighteen with a child on his knee, whose mother had just died and been buried.”35 This was immiseration before the term came into use. As the weavers saw demand for their services disappear and their incomes collapse, many of them were forced out of the industry or left of their own volition. Between 1820 and 1845, their numbers fell from 240,000 to 60,000.36

In history books, the Luddite movement is often portrayed as a struggle over mechanization and the social impact of technical progress. But as the historian E. P. Thompson pointed out many years ago in his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, that was only part of the story. What was at stake, Thompson wrote, wasn’t simply workers’ opposition to new machinery but “the freedom of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship.” The most central issue was the morality, or immorality, of a new economic system that, in the minds of its victims, was violating a long-established set of social values and reciprocal obligations. The Luddites “saw laissez-faire not as freedom, but as ‘foul Imposition,’” Thompson pointed out. “They could see no ‘natural law’ by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.”37

Even some members of the upper orders sympathized with these sentiments. One of them was the romantic poet Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords, delivered on February 27, 1812, amounted to a passionate defense of the Luddites. Byron, who was only twenty-four, had recently returned from a grand tour of Europe and the Levant to his mother’s home in Nottinghamshire, where some stocking knitters were busy attacking workshops. “During the short time I recently passed in Nottinghamshire, not twelve hours elapsed without some fresh act of violence; and, on the day I left the county, I was informed that forty frames had been broken the preceding evening,” the young poet told the assembled peers. “But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress.”38

Byron went on to describe how the domestic impact of the Napoleonic Wars and the introduction of new types of knitting frames had combined to decimate the knitters’ incomes and throw many of them out of work. Only desperation could drive such an “honest and industrious body of the people”39 to resort to violence, he said, and he criticized the government and its supporters in the Lords for sending in the military to put down the protests:

You call these men a mob, desperate, dangerous and ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to quiet the ‘Bellua multorum capitum,’ is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads … Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses—that man your navy, and recruit your army—that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also defy you, when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair! You may call the people a mob; but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiment of the people.40

Byron also criticized the Frame-Breaking Act, which Parliament was then debating, and the prospective capital punishments associated with it. “How will you carry the Bill into effect?” he asked. “Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? or will you proceed (as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation? Place the country under martial law? depopulate and lay waste all around you?”41 Even as Byron appealed for an understanding of the workers’ cause, he must have known that his speech would have no impact on policy. The stocking knitters themselves, before resorting to machine breaking, had in vain appealed for a parliamentary intervention on their behalf. That precedent didn’t put Byron off. In 1816 he returned to the defense of the machine breakers, this time in verse. In the first stanza of his poem “Song for the Luddites,” he wrote:

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

So we, boys, we

Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!42

“It is time … to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society”

William Thompson’s Utilitarian Socialism

The immiseration of handicraft workers wasn’t the only downside of industrialization. Two years after Byron wrote his tribute poem to the Luddites, an underground journal based in London, Black Dwarf, published a firsthand account of conditions in the Manchester cotton mills, where a new class of industrial workers, many of them women and children, were working long hours for low wages. The anonymous author, who identified himself as a cotton spinner, invited his readers to “stand in an avenue leading to a factory a little before five o’clock in the morning, and observe the squalid appearance of the little infants and their parents taken from their beds at so early an hour in all kinds of weather.”1

In the mills of Ancoats and other cotton-manufacturing districts, workers—some of them as young as eight or nine—were working twelveor fourteen-hour days. To prevent the yarns from snapping, mill owners kept their factories hot and damp, which caused respiratory ailments. The owners also imposed strict discipline on their workers. “There they are (and if late a few minutes, a quarter of a day is stopped in wages) locked up until night locked up in rooms heated above the hottest days we have had this summer,” the cotton spinner wrote, “and allowed no time, except three quarters of an hour at dinner, in the whole day.” The mill owners in their domestic lives put on an “ostentatious display of elegant mansions, equipages, liveries, parks, hunters, hounds, &c,” the writer noted. At work, their overriding goal was to “keep wages low for the purpose of keeping the spinners indigent and spiritless … as for the purpose of taking the surplus to their own pockets.”2

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The use of the term surplus is instructive. From Byron and his fellow poet Robert Southey, to the Tory patricians Richard Oastler and Michael Sadler, a number of upper-class Englishmen inveighed against the depredations that industrial capitalism was bringing in its wake, echoing some of the Luddites’ complaints. But whereas these critiques tended to be cast in moral terms, a group of critics from the left focused on the economics of the new system and the possibilities of replacing it with something fairer and more communal. These thinkers didn’t have much, if any, influence on policymaking, which increasingly hewed toward laissezfaire. But they helped lay the intellectual foundations for a political countermovement to industrial capitalism: socialism.

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William Thompson was born in 1775 in the Irish port of Cork. He hailed from a wealthy family, which was part of the Protestant ascendancy that ruled Ireland. His father, John Thompson, was a merchant who imported, among other things, sugar, rum, and tea, and exported Irish butter. (He also served as the mayor of Cork.) Some details of William Thompson’s early life are lacking, but he appears to have been well educated and spent time in France and the Low Countries.3 The Irish historian Fintan Lane says that he became a partner in the family firm in 1800 and took it over five years later, when his father retired. A successful businessman he wasn’t. In 1808 a court declared him bankrupt, with £13,000 in debts outstanding. Fortunately for him, his father owned a large estate near the scenic coastal village of Glandore. When John Thompson died in 1814, William inherited this land, which was cultivated by tenant farmers. It gave him an annual income of roughly £600, which enabled him to concentrate on his real passion: reading and writing.4

Thompson became an active member, and benefactor, of the Royal Cork Institution, an educational center that maintained a library of scientific works and put on public lectures. His main interests were philosophy and political economy, but he also read widely about science, medicine, and agriculture. A confirmed atheist, he seems to have taken delight in outraging many of his social peers, particularly the churchgoing ones, Protestant and Roman Catholic. In Glandore, some of the local folk referred to him as “the philosopher” and considered him a magician. “It is said in the locality that he read the latest books on medicine, tested their theories on his sick neighbors, and when he effected a cure he would jokingly tell his patients not to thank God but his pills and the devil,” Thompson’s first biographer, Richard Pankhurst, wrote. “Such atheistic utterances were regarded indulgently by an unquestioning Catholic community because of his unfailing kindness and good humour.”5

Unlike many Irish landlords of the time, Thompson cared about the welfare of his tenant farmers, who, like the vast majority of the Irish population under British rule, were poor and illiterate. To help raise them up, he advocated education reform. In 1818 he published a pamphlet that called for “a cheap and liberal system of education, adapted to active life, superior to what schools can teach.”6 Thompson was heavily influenced by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his doctrine of utilitarianism, which demanded that all institutions and policies be evaluated based on whether they contributed to the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”7 Bentham was another fervent advocate of education reform, and Thompson sent the great man a series of letters. Evidently Bentham was impressed by his correspondent. In 1819 he invited Thompson to stay at his home in Queen’s Square Place, Westminster, and share his regimented daily regime. “Hour of dinner, six,” Bentham wrote to Thompson; “tea between nine and ten; bed, a quarter before eleven. Dinner and tea in society; breakfast my guests, whoever they are, have at their own hour, and by themselves.”8

Despite his admiration for Bentham, Thompson didn’t initially take up his invitation. Instead, he turned his attention to a book about the distribution of wealth and income. This project was inspired, he would later explain, by a public lecture he attended in Cork, where “a gentleman celebrated for his skill in the controversies of political economy thought proper to descant on the blessings of the inequality of wealth, as now established; on the dependence and consequent gratitude which the poor should feel to the rich; on the too-great freedom and too-great equality of wealth of the United States of America.”9 Outraged by these arguments, Thompson embarked on a study of political economy, initially with a view to preparing a brief public lecture about it. The project turned into a multiyear endeavor.