ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Who Makes the Luddites Rise?”: Popular History, Satire, and Late Victorian Technoscientific Dissent

• In Event: Contested Sciences

English Abstract

This paper examines how resistance to technoscientific development in the Late Victorian period (1870-1901) was interpreted as a renewed threat akin to the Luddite “machine-breaking” uprisings of the early nineteenth century (1811-1817). Despite a rich historiography on the original Luddite riots, comparatively little attention has been paid to what Jeff Wasserstrom has called the “afterlives of Luddism,” or its persistence as a cultural shorthand for technoscientific resistance and critique (Wasserstrom 1987). The Late Victorian period provides a critical vantage point from which to study Luddism. By the 1880s, nearly seventy years after the original “disturbances,” the Luddites had become a fixture of the British historical imagination. The first popular histories emerged alongside dictionary and encyclopedia entries that codified “Luddite” in the metropolitan lexicon. At the same time, imperial journalism and state policy exported the term across Britain’s Empire, using it to classify and contain forms of dissent. The persistent citation in newspapers and speeches of the satirical verse—“Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise? Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?”—extended the metaphor of “the Luddites rising” into new arenas, preserving the specter of technological revolt. As the “Pax Britannica” was increasingly called into question, the inquiry into who or what makes “the Luddites rise” became a powerful diagnostic of Victorian anxieties, revealing how the term functioned not simply as a historical reference but also as a flexible metaphor through which British society interpreted and disciplined technoscientific dissent.

Author

• Claire Ann Votava, University of California, Los Angeles