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Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12
Kapitalist modernleşmenin şafağı… Mülksüzleştirme ve işçileştirme pratiklerine karşı direnenlerin tarihi. Çitlemelere, üretimin makineleşmesine, yoğun köle emeği kullanımına karşı, efsanelerden, mitolojik figürlerden, kehanetlerden beslenen, kapitalist üretimin tahakkümüne girmeyi reddeden ve en önemlisi de ortak olandan yoksun bırakılmaya ve değersizleştirilmeye meydan okuyan bir başkaldırı tarihi. Proleter isyanların en doğrudan, en tehditkâr ve ilk küresel biçiminin öyküsü: Makine Kırıcılar.
49 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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About the author
Peter Linebaugh
27 books94 followersPeter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 15, 2018
The first in the Retort Pamphlet Series, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab made for a fascinating hour or so, but it left me wanting more. I’ve only read bits and pieces of Peter Linebaugh up to this point, which I need to change. But even that little bit has been enough to support the rock star epithet he’s garnered in the history world. He has a way of elevating the historically overlooked and constructing a secular hagiography of the misfits, outsiders, revolutionaries, and eccentrics who drive these hidden histories. It may sound hyperbolic and it may be somewhat hyperbolic, but it’s not without truth. Some academic treatment places the Luddites in a context highlighting resistance to progress and technology. Here Linebaugh gives the revolting textile workers a fair shake from another angle.
He explores the Luddites and their mythical patriarch through the enclosure of the commons, romanticism, and events happening elsewhere in the world at the time. In explaining the blow to freedom enclosure brought, he doesn’t just talk about land. He talks about the enclosure of the household, of gender roles, of worship, of labor as the artisan and craftsman gave way to factories and their workers in highly limited (and unrewarding) roles, of infrastructure, of rivers, of roads, of punishment in prisons, even of our very vocabulary as tied down by the consensus of the dictionary.
While this widening of the definition of ‘enclosure’ certainly gave me a new and helpful perspective, the most interesting thing to me was the connection of the “machine-breakers” with emerging romanticism. Specifically, Shelley’s Queen Mab, with its connotations of “the magical sublime of first, the colonial, second, the indigenous, and third, the agrarian.” In drawing from the Irish legend and its various incarnations elsewhere, the political Shelley places a mystical stamp on the commoners’ fight for freedom and power, even as oppression won out.
Linebaugh looked elsewhere as well, from Native Americans in North America to the Caribbean, Ireland, Africa, and South America, thus placing the Luddites in a wider tradition of revolt. In part, I think, this is to firmly root capitalism historically as an oppressive force drowning out freedom, creativity, community, and connection to nature and God (without dogma). I also think that wider lens is meant to emphasize that such forces, though based in historical materialism, become mythologies that might inform the present and the direction we take moving into the future.
“Thus, from Blake’s satanic mills to the Luddite’s damnation of the prime minister and home secretary, from Shakespeare’s porter to Milton’s demons, from Shelley’s hell of war to de Quincy’s hell of murder, the material structures of modern English history – commercial agriculture, enclosures, the criminalized artisan, the factory, and the machine – were likened to the place of burning fires and eternal torment.”
Perhaps Shelley is not all hell, but Queen Mab taken alongside the Luddites appeals to the imagination where most historical analysis remains dry. And in putting romanticism in his argument isn’t a stretch. In doing so Linebaugh adds an important texture of the times a modern would otherwise miss.
I love the idea of this pamphlet series, both for the convenience and for the link to a political past, but I would also love to read a more fleshed out version of this.
He explores the Luddites and their mythical patriarch through the enclosure of the commons, romanticism, and events happening elsewhere in the world at the time. In explaining the blow to freedom enclosure brought, he doesn’t just talk about land. He talks about the enclosure of the household, of gender roles, of worship, of labor as the artisan and craftsman gave way to factories and their workers in highly limited (and unrewarding) roles, of infrastructure, of rivers, of roads, of punishment in prisons, even of our very vocabulary as tied down by the consensus of the dictionary.
While this widening of the definition of ‘enclosure’ certainly gave me a new and helpful perspective, the most interesting thing to me was the connection of the “machine-breakers” with emerging romanticism. Specifically, Shelley’s Queen Mab, with its connotations of “the magical sublime of first, the colonial, second, the indigenous, and third, the agrarian.” In drawing from the Irish legend and its various incarnations elsewhere, the political Shelley places a mystical stamp on the commoners’ fight for freedom and power, even as oppression won out.
Linebaugh looked elsewhere as well, from Native Americans in North America to the Caribbean, Ireland, Africa, and South America, thus placing the Luddites in a wider tradition of revolt. In part, I think, this is to firmly root capitalism historically as an oppressive force drowning out freedom, creativity, community, and connection to nature and God (without dogma). I also think that wider lens is meant to emphasize that such forces, though based in historical materialism, become mythologies that might inform the present and the direction we take moving into the future.
“Thus, from Blake’s satanic mills to the Luddite’s damnation of the prime minister and home secretary, from Shakespeare’s porter to Milton’s demons, from Shelley’s hell of war to de Quincy’s hell of murder, the material structures of modern English history – commercial agriculture, enclosures, the criminalized artisan, the factory, and the machine – were likened to the place of burning fires and eternal torment.”
Perhaps Shelley is not all hell, but Queen Mab taken alongside the Luddites appeals to the imagination where most historical analysis remains dry. And in putting romanticism in his argument isn’t a stretch. In doing so Linebaugh adds an important texture of the times a modern would otherwise miss.
I love the idea of this pamphlet series, both for the convenience and for the link to a political past, but I would also love to read a more fleshed out version of this.
June 6, 2020
I've been an admirer of Peter Linebaugh's writing for some time having read The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. He was a student of Christopher Hill who wrote the game-changing The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution.
This pamphlet is ostensibly the presentation given by Linebaugh to a conference at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2011 on "The Luddites, Without Condescension" on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the north. 'The Many Headed Hydra' pulled together disparate strands of evidence to show that the transportation of dissenters and revolutionaries, both religious and secular at the end of the English Civil War (let's just call it that for simplicity) produced climates and pockets of revolutionary fervour and dissent throughout the world which had major impacts. Ned Ludd was the fictional leader of the machine breakers. Queen Mab, as well as being the title of Shelley's epic poem is also the mythic Fairy Queen who rides through sleepers dreams. Linebaugh attempts to do the same in this pamphlet for the Luddites as he did with the motley crew in 'The Many Headed Hydra'. In my opinion it fails to do what is trumpeted on the back cover and Introduction, which is raise the memory of the Luddites out of the realm of historic condescension. In fact, it doesn't give us much about the Luddites and their activities at all other than in sideways looks.
What it DOES do is provide a whole raft of events, activities, cultural references, raise points and attempt connections which may or may not be causal or affective to the Luddites and their activities. Possibly only Peter Linnebaugh would have connected the speech of The Porter in Shakespeare's Macbeth written in 1623 with Luddite activities in 1811. Sure.... we understand now that history is many sided and multi-stranded, that it is not a linear stream of events. But by throwing the kitchen sink and all its contents at the subject Linebaugh leaves us with a sense of millennial student paper - a sort of 'yeah-but-no-but-yeah-like-whatever' - which detracts from the aim which is to discuss the Luddites WITHOUT CONDESCENSION.
That is not to say that this pamphlet is not an extremely interesting read. However I did not learn much about the activities and makeup of the Luddites. I DID learn quite a bit about Percy Bysshe Shelley and that has led me to reread Paul Foot's Red Shelley. As well as Shelley we also get in greater or lesser detail, Tahrir Square, Fukushima, the Occupy Movement, various world-wide events in 1811, a brief history of Enclosure of Common Land, a philosophical glance at technology and the machine age, rocketry, the plantation system, Daniel Defoe, a short history of Ireland, slavery and tool manufacture, native and slave revolt in both the Caribbean, mainland US and the Far East, the legend of Gwaelod, Shakespeare, Sheridan and De Quincey, a discussion of customs, excise and tariffs along with the building of citadel-like docks, policing, ..... Is that all? Probably not. All in a 34 A5 page pamphlet. It’s a rip-roaring fest.
Now to find something on the luddites and their connection to the labour movement.
This pamphlet is ostensibly the presentation given by Linebaugh to a conference at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2011 on "The Luddites, Without Condescension" on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the north. 'The Many Headed Hydra' pulled together disparate strands of evidence to show that the transportation of dissenters and revolutionaries, both religious and secular at the end of the English Civil War (let's just call it that for simplicity) produced climates and pockets of revolutionary fervour and dissent throughout the world which had major impacts. Ned Ludd was the fictional leader of the machine breakers. Queen Mab, as well as being the title of Shelley's epic poem is also the mythic Fairy Queen who rides through sleepers dreams. Linebaugh attempts to do the same in this pamphlet for the Luddites as he did with the motley crew in 'The Many Headed Hydra'. In my opinion it fails to do what is trumpeted on the back cover and Introduction, which is raise the memory of the Luddites out of the realm of historic condescension. In fact, it doesn't give us much about the Luddites and their activities at all other than in sideways looks.
What it DOES do is provide a whole raft of events, activities, cultural references, raise points and attempt connections which may or may not be causal or affective to the Luddites and their activities. Possibly only Peter Linnebaugh would have connected the speech of The Porter in Shakespeare's Macbeth written in 1623 with Luddite activities in 1811. Sure.... we understand now that history is many sided and multi-stranded, that it is not a linear stream of events. But by throwing the kitchen sink and all its contents at the subject Linebaugh leaves us with a sense of millennial student paper - a sort of 'yeah-but-no-but-yeah-like-whatever' - which detracts from the aim which is to discuss the Luddites WITHOUT CONDESCENSION.
That is not to say that this pamphlet is not an extremely interesting read. However I did not learn much about the activities and makeup of the Luddites. I DID learn quite a bit about Percy Bysshe Shelley and that has led me to reread Paul Foot's Red Shelley. As well as Shelley we also get in greater or lesser detail, Tahrir Square, Fukushima, the Occupy Movement, various world-wide events in 1811, a brief history of Enclosure of Common Land, a philosophical glance at technology and the machine age, rocketry, the plantation system, Daniel Defoe, a short history of Ireland, slavery and tool manufacture, native and slave revolt in both the Caribbean, mainland US and the Far East, the legend of Gwaelod, Shakespeare, Sheridan and De Quincey, a discussion of customs, excise and tariffs along with the building of citadel-like docks, policing, ..... Is that all? Probably not. All in a 34 A5 page pamphlet. It’s a rip-roaring fest.
Now to find something on the luddites and their connection to the labour movement.
January 7, 2021
Really interesting, but I lack an understanding of the basic histories he is elaborating on! The solution can only be more books. people really were breaking machines all over the world, and for good reasons that were all connected! I do think the international textile industry as this mechanized force is one of the scariest stories ever. Bad news
Read
August 14, 2018A bit of a slog in parts, but really sparked my interest in examining dockworkers and sailors alongside the common analysis of factory workers in this field.
December 29, 2012
i am not sure what this book was all about but i can tell you it was not about the luddites. i was looking for something short and too the point giving a decent overview perhaps of what is largely a misunderstood and much maligned working class movement. this book though was pretty and well written and vaguely interesting but it was all over the place and i was not sure what the point was. from percey shelley to tecumseh,, it was some sort of overview of something. i don't know. not sure who the target audience is for this but it's not me...
March 17, 2014
Recommended for broader international context on the English Luddite movement 1811-13, perhaps in tandem with Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against the Future.
February 27, 2022
Movidas turbias y embarradas bien guapas. Lo oscuro de la Historia. A tope con los fragmentos sobre luddismo fuera de Europa.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews