> Few groups have been more misunderstood and have had their image and
> name more frequently misappropriated and distorted than the Luddites.
> The Luddites were not, as not only popularizers of theories of
> technology but also capitalist apologists for unregulated innovation
> claim, universally technophobes. The Luddites were artisans -- primarily
> skilled workers in the textile industries in Nottinghamshire,
> Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire,
> Lancashire and Flintshire in the years between March 1811 and April 1817
> -- who when faced with the use of machines (operated by less-skilled
> labor, typically apprentices, unapprenticed workers, and women) to drive
> down their wages and to produce inferior goods (thereby damaging their
> trades' reputations), turned to wrecking the offensive machines and
> terrorizing the offending owners in order to preserve their wages, their
> jobs, and their trades. Machines were not the only, or even the major,
> threat to the textile workers of the Midlands and North. The Prince
> Regent's Orders in Council, barring trade with Napoleonic France and
> nations friendly to France, cut off foreign markets for the British
> textile industry. Even more importantly, famine and high food prices
> required more of each laborer's shrinking wages. Machines and the use of
> machines to drive down wages were simply the most accessible targets for
> expressions of anger and direct action.
>===========================
Unlike their bosses, the Luddites didn't think murder was a decent way to achieve their goals....it was, after all, illegal.
Ian