Welcome to the finale of season nine of Origin Story. We’re wrapping up the season by telling the thrilling, misunderstood story of the Luddites and how their name became an insult synonymous with ignorance, reaction and fear of progress. You can’t get much more Origin Story than that.

It was November 1811 when textile workers in Nottinghamshire first began breaking machinery in the name of a mysterious figure called Ned Ludd. The movement spread through neighbouring counties and reached its dramatic peak in Yorkshire, as these secretive activists waged guerrilla warfare against the factory owners who were destroying their livelihoods.

Soon, England was in a frenzy over the Luddite threat. Led by Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval and the decadent Prince Regent, the ruling classes feared a French-style revolution. As Luddite violence escalated from machine-breaking to arson, food riots and assassination attempts, the state responded with spies, torture and show trials. Swathes of industrial England fell under military occupation. In the midst of all this, Perceval himself was shot dead in the House of Commons. Yet by February 1813 the Luddite fire had burned out and the bosses appeared to have won.

It was only in the 1950s that “Luddite” was turned into a general insult, even as revisionist historians of the English working classes started to tell a different story about the motives of the machine-breakers. Amid rising hostility towards Big Tech and AI, the legacy of the Luddite rebellion feels surprisingly relevant more than 200 years later.

Who were the Luddites? What was going wrong in England in 1811 to inspire such a viral rebellion? Were the Luddites targeting the machines, or the industrialists, or the state itself? Was their uprising really a failure or did it pave the way for fairer industrial relations? What does it mean to be a neo-Luddite today? And can the true history of the Luddites ever prevail over the crude stereotype created by their enemies?

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Reading list

Books

• Kyle Chayka – ‘Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.’, New Yorker (26 September 2023)

• Kyle Chayka – ‘The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology’, New Yorker (8 April 2026)

• F.O. Darvall – Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934)

• Carl J. Griffin – ‘Luddism, Machine-Breaking and the Swing Riots’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique (2025)

• J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond – The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (1919)

• Eric Hobsbawm – ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past & Present (February 1952)

• Brian Merchant – Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (2023)

• Kirkpatrick Sale – Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War Against the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (1995)

• Tech Won’t Save Us: The Real History of the Luddites, presented by Paris Marx (28 September, 2023)

• Malcolm I. Thomis – The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (1970)

• E.P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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