9 sources behind this chapter. Each one carries a note on what it is doing in the argument.
This is behind the Luddites’ sixteen-pound ‘Great Enoch’ hammers and the Yorkshire raids in the book’s account of workers fighting the machines that had stripped the value from their craft.
Open this source Read the original
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963. (The 'Great Enoch' sledgehammers and Yorkshire raids.)
The parliamentary testimony of Joseph Hebergam gives the Industrial Revolution its human cost: a child worker whose body had been damaged by the mill before he was old enough to vote.
Open this source Read the original
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. Report of the Select Committee (The Sadler Report), Minutes of Evidence, 7 July 1832. Via Spartacus Educational. (Testimony of Joseph Hebergam.)
Used for the conditions endured by Lancashire’s hand-loom weavers after mechanised production collapsed their wages and independence.
Open this source Read the original
Taylor, W. Cooke. Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire. London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842. (The Lancashire hand-loom weavers.)
The source behind the government’s military response to the Luddites and the law that made breaking a machine punishable by death.
Open this source Read the original
Binfield, Kevin. Writings of the Luddites. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. (Military deployment and the Frame Breaking Act.)
This local history keeps the 1826 uprising attached to the places and people who lived it: hand-loom weavers facing hunger, falling wages and machines that changed the value of their work almost overnight.
Open this source Read the original
Weavers Uprising Bicentennial Committee. 'Remembering the 1826 Weavers Uprising in East Lancashire.' Manchester Histories, 2022.
A people’s-eye view of the Industrial Revolution, used to keep the transformation from becoming a tidy story told only through inventions, output and eventual prosperity.
Open this source Read the original
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. Yale University Press, 2014.
The economic history behind the hand-loom example: mechanisation did not simply remove a task; it changed wages, bargaining power and the shape of an occupation over time.
Open this source Read the original
Allen, Robert C. ‘The hand-loom weaver and the power loom: a Schumpeterian perspective.’ European Review of Economic History 22(4), 2018, pp. 381–402. doi:10.1093/ereh/hex030.
This paper gives the chapter its broader frame: technology can replace some forms of labour while creating new tasks around it, and the balance depends on what institutions and employers choose to build.
Open this source Read the original
Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. 'The Race Between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth and Jobs.' American Economic Review, Vol. 108, No. 6. doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160696
Anthropic’s early labour-market study is used in Chapters 2 and 6 to distinguish exposure from realised displacement, and in Chapter 24 for the tentative evidence that hiring of workers aged twenty-two to twenty-five has slowed in highly exposed occupations.
Open this source Read the original
Massenkoff, Maxim, and Peter McCrory. ‘Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence.’ Anthropic, 5 March 2026.