Luddites Riots

In late eighteenth-century England, the industrial revolution commenced reconstructing life in Britain. Until then most people settled in the countryside and earned their living by farming. However, many became troubled with the changes that began to come about. One of which was a shift from an agriculturally based economy to an industrial one. This resulted in social unrest which led to riots. These included riots about food, crimping, enclosure, and machinery. The social unrest in England between 1780 to 1820 took the violent forms of food riots, crimping house riots, anti-enclosure riots, and the Luddite movement.

The first type of violent social unrest in eighteenth-century England were food riots. Food riots were protests that materialized

You may be familiar with the term Luddite when referring to someone who is opposed to new technology. The Luddite movement is somewhat similar, it consisted of Luddites and their violent reaction to the introduction of machines during the Industrial Revolution. These reactions included petitions, intimidation, strikes, and machine-breaking. One source of the anti-machinery attitude was the displacement of female labor. In technological terms, machine-breaking was also a means of influencing which mechanical approach to a technical problem would prevail (Horn

In the West Country, the woolen industry was successful in resisting mechanization through direct action. In Leicester in 1787, the introduction of mechanized spinning was put off for a generation because of an attack on machinery (Horn 151). Another major triumph of the machine-breakers was “registered by the agricultural labourers who destroyed thousands of threshing machines” (Horn 151). This set the return of the threshing machines back for a whole generation. Some short-lived successes included higher wages and the stopping of making cut-ups which were practiced in the Nottingham hosiery industries. In the end, Britain successfully fought off the rioters and enforced strong laws concerning