Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kirkpatrick Sale

Critical Essay by Kirkpatrick Sale

SOURCE: Sale, Kirkpatrick. “With Hatchet, Pike, and Gun.” In Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age, pp. 7-24. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995.

In the following essay, Sale provides background on the Luddite revolt and other events in the workers' movement against machines. He then discusses nineteenth-century responses by British intellectuals and artists to the new industrialization and shows the relevance of Luddism to twenty-first-century life.

It was about a half hour after midnight on an April Sunday in 1812 that the band of some six score Yorkshiremen finally made their way down the rutted lane that led to a place called Rawfolds Mill, a looming multistory building, protected by a gated wall, housing the hated woolen machines of the hated manufacturer William Cartwright. Ostensibly organized as a military brigade, though bedraggled somewhat now after their hour-long march...
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