The Risings of the Luddites

Book excerpt: Published in 1968. Interest in the Luddite machine-breaking and food riots of 1812 which took place in the North and Midlands continues unabated. Peel was a pioneer local historian, collecting oral accounts from participants and old inhabitants, as well as studying the printed evidence carefully. In the introduction to the new edition, E. P. Thompson clams that Peel's general account of Luddism in that part of Yorkshire in which he was interested (around Huddersfield) has proved to be more accurate than the analysis of Luddism as a purely industrial phenomenon given by twentieth-century historians, including the Hammonds. This book will be useful to historians of working-class movements.