profit-hungry traders. Such riots were particularly frequent in the worst year of the war, , but they continued until the 1840s. Another cause of hardship was the process known as ‘enclosure’ – by which, from the 1770s, hundreds of small farms had been merged into the larger ones of powerful landlords. Poor rural families affected by this had sought industrial work.
But the introduction of machines in the cotton industry threw thousands of handloom weavers out of work and into poverty, since their labour was too slow to compete with machines. From the 1790s, these weavers began to demand a legal minimum wage, which was refused by Parliament. When they went on strike, they were dispersed by force. In desperation, in Lancashire, cotton weavers destroyed the powerlooms which they believed had destroyed their livelihood.
There was also resistance to the introduction of machines in the woollen knitting industry in Nottingham; protests also took place in Leicestershire and Derbyshire. In Yorkshire, shearing-frames were destroyed by croppers, who had traditionally sheared sheep by hand. In the riots of , farm labourers found their jobs threatened by the new threshing machines that separated the grain from the husk. The rioters smashed these machines.
Nine of them were hanged and were sent to Australia as convicts (see Theme ). The movement known as Luddism ( - ), led by the charismatic General Ned Ludd, exemplified another type of protest. Luddism was not merely a backward-looking assault on machines. Its participants demanded a minimum wage, control over the labour of women and children, work for those who had lost their jobs because of the coming of machinery, and the right to form trade unions so that they could legally present these demands.
During the early years of industrialisation, the working population possessed neither the vote nor legal methods to express their anger at the drastic manner in which their lives had been overturned. In August , , people gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to claim democratic rights – of political organisation, of public meetings, and of the freedom of the press. They were suppressed