The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today.
The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers.
Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.
Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices:
What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool).
> People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant.
Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare.
Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying.
What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing.
Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.
That's not as true in the US's development. There's such an abundance of land and rapid expansion made it easier and easier for new landowners to grab acres of land. American to this day is still very sparse as a country.
US farmers had a bunch of land and possibly slave labor. They had little need to adapt to new tech. And yes, stability is key if you have it; it's a fleeting feeling (even to this day).
Until the local lord took a fancy to a different type of agriculture, drove you off and ploughed your village back into the soil!
I've been watching time-team recently and this seems to come up semi-frequently. Your family could have been there for 200 years, no matter, bye now!
The middle ages saw the growth of cities, commerce, increasingly industrial agriculture, etc. It also saw non-peasant societies like the vikings, muslim civilization, etc.
There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.
You're right the Victorians, like the Pre-Raphelites and Oxford movement, fetishized medieval life. But that was a reaction against anti-medieval Tudor-begun propaganda in place since the Plantagenets were defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485).
Surely the viking and muslim kingdoms had the base in farmers? I mean, neither were nomad civilizations.
It really isn't. This is the accepted term in academia, so long as you don't dispute the user of the term "medieval". While the period did see an outgrowth of cities, the vast majority (80%++) of the population was rural in almost every country throughout the period, including Scandinavian ones: Viking was a profession, not a culture, and the vast majority of Scandinavians, including Vikings, were in fact farmers, which is evidenced by how once the "Great Heathen Army" secured a foothold in Northumberland they proceeded to build a bunch of farms, thus all the places now named "-by" in northern England. Similarly, "Muslim civilization" was not a monolith. Yes, Arabia is not exactly conducive to settled agriculture, but Egypt and the Levant -- the political heartlands of Arab civilization from the 8th century and onwards -- were among the most agriculturally productive lands on earth, and a similarly large proportion of their population was engaged in the hereditary profession of agriculture as a result.
> There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.
This is true, and something very commonly overlooked. People think of medieval life as "brutish and short" but in reality these were stable, largely prosperous societies.
> most peasants did not own their own land,
If you mean most individuals then sure, but on a per household basis actually most peasants did indeed have land to call their own. E.g. reference The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England. The "bottom rung" was predominantly half-virgater villeins, who were unfree leaseholders with barely enough to feed their family -- but they did still 'own' their land insofar as they had perpetual usufruct to it, and by the early 1500s paid essentially nothing in rent due to inflation and hereditary fixed rent levels.
> What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability.
Sure, I don't disagree. I never tried to claim that peasant life was great and enjoyable -- but people, especially people with kids to take care of, tend to value a baseline of stability above all else.
Historically most farmers were some form of serf. So I think it was common.
If your ten-year-old apprentice died because of your negligence, it damaged your business both in the day to day, in the long run, and reputationally. So you kept your apprentices alive, and you ultimately had to feed them.
For the first few decades of the industrial revolution, if a kid died in a factory situation because they lost concentration out of hunger and exhaustion, so what? Get another kid. Deaths of semi-skilled labour happened at scale, because the agency of those who were looking after them was taken away.
It really did take mass protests and labour organising to deal with it. Industry has an institutional memory of what that cost them, which is why unions are treated the way they are now, and why they are so urgently needed again.