SOURCE: Thomis, Malcolm I. “Machine-Breakers and Luddites.” In The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England, pp. 11-40. Newton Abbot, Eng.: David & Charles, 1970.

In the following excerpt, Thomis discusses the social and political context of the Luddite Rebellion and attempts to define exactly who the Luddites were and what they sought to achieve. He also examines inconsistencies in depictions of Luddism in writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Luddites present initially a problem of definition. It is useless to write or argue about them unless their identity is clear.

Employers were being threatened by letters signed ‘Ned Ludd’ in December 1811, and in that month the Nottingham Review carried reports of stocking-frame breakers or ‘Luddites as they are now called’. The name was first used, it seems, of men who broke stocking-frames in 1811, and shortly afterwards John Blackner, a historian of Nottingham, proffered an explanation of the term which...