Alan Brooke's review of 'Ned Ludd & Queen Mab' by Peter Linebaugh

"Ned Ludd & Queen Mab – Machine-Breaking, Romanticism and the Several Commons of 1811-1812", Peter Linebaugh (Retort Pamphlet, 2012)

The bicentenary of the Luddite risings has produced disappointingly little new academic research on Luddism. However, this booklet of only 40 pages goes some way towards filling that vacuum. Based on a lecture he delivered to a conference to mark the bicentenary held at Birkbeck College in 2011, Peter Linebaugh sets out not only to rescue the Luddites from the ‘condescension of posterity’ but also place them firmly in an international context. 

As Ned Ludd is the mythic symbol of Luddite resistance to unwelcome industrialisation in England, so Queen Mab, through her personification in Shelley’s poem of that name composed in 1812, becomes the symbol of a radical critique of western civilisation as a whole. Although Shelley later dismissed the poem as naive juvenilia, his passionate denunciation of monarchy, militarism, the church and capitalism remained an inspiration for working class radicals into the Chartist period and beyond.

From the vantage point of 1811-12, Linebaugh launches a sweeping survey of the processes underway which were dispossessing not only the Luddites and the English common people of the means of production, including the land, but were also impacting on traditional communities across the world. And, as with the Luddites, such communities responded with acts of resistance, which, while often ending in defeat, nevertheless helped shape the modern world.

From Ireland to Egypt, through Creek and slave risings in the US, the insurrections of Hidalgo and Miranda in Latin America and the reactionary backlash following the Ratcliff Highway murders in England,  Linebaugh links the increasing exploitation of producers and the expropriation of the means of production to the development of global capitalism. Inevitably, in such a broad brush approach, the details of such interconnectedness is sometimes assumed rather than demonstrated and there are some omissions. Particularly, since he takes the Luddite response to mechanisation in the woollen industry as one of his main points of reference, there is no mention of the clearances in the Scottish highlands and islands, where whole communities were swept away to make room for sheep.

Also, in following E.P. Thompson’s effort to assign the Luddites their proper role in history, Linebaugh has also reproduced one of Thompson’s historiographic errors in placing too much reliance on the late 19th century writer Frank Peel. Consequently Linebaugh suggests that the Luddite, George Mellor, could have been influenced by the utopian socialism of Robert Owen, even though Owen was not a socialist in 1812. Another reference to Mellor also claims that he was a veteran of the Egyptian campaign, for which there is no contemporary evidence, apart from the fact he would only have been about ten years old at the time!

However, such factual errors, and the inevitable omissions inescapable in such an ambitious synthesising work, should not put the reader off. The booklet is extremely thought-provoking and provides a backdrop to the Luddite risings which has not really been explored previously, since Luddite studies have tended to focus-in on the local rather than stand back and observe the global. It also adds a new dimension to English working class history as a whole and helps counteract some of the parochialism which still affects this field both academically and in orthodox ‘labourist’ approaches which concentrate on the supposed deference of the English working class, dominated by a trade union consciousness steeped in constitutionalism. Linebaugh brings to life the other tradition expressed by the Luddites and by Shelley’s damning philosophical condemnation of the British state in all its manifestations.

The final paragraph of the work contains one of Linebaugh’s most valuable insights encapsulated in a single word. Here he refers to the ‘poesis of the Luddites’. This concept is one which requires elaboration for all those who consider themselves the heirs of Luddism.  Instead of the ‘praxis’ of political struggle, an often mechanistic action born of a preconceived theory, the concept of ‘poesis’ implies, as its shared root with poetry suggest, an act of creativity, imagination, intuition and spontaneity. The Luddites have often been dismissed by orthodox Marxists and labourites because their actions did not fit in with the ideal course of class struggle. Linebaugh’s global panorama shows that they had a better grasp of what was at stake than those who claim to be guided by scientific theory. This work is a fitting bicentennial tribute to the Luddites and, notwithstanding its brevity, an important contribution to Luddite research.

Alan Brooke

You can buy a copy of 'Ned Ludd & Queen Mab' from our amazon astore here. An mp3 of Peter Linebaugh's lecture at the 2011 Birkbeck Luddite conference is embedded below.

Review: John Beckett 'The Luddites: 200 Years On', for the Thoroton Society of Nottingham

Having never attended any meeting of a local history society before, I didn't know what to expect from this event - other than perhaps the stereotype of what such occasions may be like: average age mid sixties, tweeds, conservative ('small c' and 'big C'). The stereotypes didn't let me down after all. Despite my valiant attempt to lower the average age by 25 years or so, I was simply outnumbered - the organisers had underestimated the interest, and extra seats were called for.

What we got was a talk with a very high quota of dates and names and events, but with perhaps less analysis than you'd expect of a professor of history. In the circumstances, he was probably giving this audience what they wanted, and there is a lot to get through in a potted history of Midlands Luddism after all. A scholar of Luddism wouldn't have learned too much that was new here, but one nugget that did come out of it for me and explained a lot was the contemporary legal limitations on the Nottingham authorities which prevented an effective response to the events of Arnold on 11th March 1811: the Nottingham City authorities simply had no remit to stray over the Nottinghamshire County borders without obtaining permission from the Home Office - obviously impossible at such short notice.

Given that one of the Thoroton Society's most famous scholars is the author of several works about Luddism, Malcolm Thomis, it's perhaps unsurprising then that the conclusion that John Beckett reached chimes with Thomis' ultimately conservative historical analysis - that the Luddites were simply opposed to change, and that any resistance to innovation can only succeed in the short-term. There's a certain amount of truth to that - Luddites did oppose changes that would reduce them to penury & destitution, and who can blame them? Thomis saw the Luddites as apolitical and reactionary, and whilst Beckett didn't exactly go quite that far, one joke aimed at his conservative audience ('small c' but particularly 'big C') went down well, but was actually ahistorical and ignorant - he joked that perhaps local miners and Arthur Scargill had Luddite DNA, given the Miners' Strike of 1984-1985 . No doubt E.P. Thompson would delight in the parallels being drawn between the potentially revolutionary actions of Miners in the 1980s and the pseudo-revolutionary actions of the Luddites 170 years before, but that isn't what Beckett meant. The irony is that Nottinghamshire was the home of the scab Union, the Union of Democratic of Mineworkers - whilst their members may well indeed be ancestors of Nottinghamshire Luddites, their actions in breaking the strike 25 years ago prove they have nothing else in common with them, a parallel conveniently missed by professor Beckett.

In the meantime, let's hope there's a veritable festival of events to look forward to in Nottingham come November 2011, the anniversary of things getting really serious in the area 200 years ago.