One of the defining features of the Industrial Revolution was the Luddite rebellion against the machines that people thought were taking their jobs and livelihoods.

Of course, when we look at that situation through the very long lens of history we can see that these fears were unfounded, and ultimately jobs were created to replace those lost, and income generally grew as productivity rose. Despite that, however, Engels’ pause highlights the significant period of time during which the lot of workers was undoubtedly affected by the new technologies they were competing against.

With the rise of the various technologies that make up the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution, many have pondered whether a similar rebellion against the machine might be looming large.  That topic has been covered at depth, but new research from the University of Zurich explores the topic from a new angle by examining whether certain parts to the UK were more prone to protest than others.

Raging against the machine

The researchers examine the so-called “Swing Riots”, which took place in England between 1830 and 1832.  It was at the time the largest wave of protests in the history of the country, with workers aggressively demanding better working conditions and higher wages via the killing of livestock, burning of barns, and the destroying of machinery that came to embody the era.

Just as the Luddite rebellion from earlier in the 19th century was forged around the fictional character of Ned Ludd, the Swing Riots created Captain Swing to act as the anonymous voice for their movement.  His name would adorn threats of violence and arson and he acted as a rallying point for the cause.

It’s believed that the Swing Riots emerged for a number of reasons, including the groundswell in immigration from Ireland, early shortcomings in the burgeoning welfare system, a series of bad harvests, and general outrage about the destruction of agricultural jobs.  Whereas the Luddite rebellion was very much focused around the textile industry, the Swing Riots were more agricultural in origin.

One of the new machines introduced around that time was the thresher, which separates grains of cereal from their husks.  When performed manually, this is back-breaking work, but it was a common role for men in 1800, who were often employed for the entire winter on this task.  The new machines were able to save labor by a factor of up to 10, so were of considerable benefit to farmers, but obviously posed a considerable threat to workers.

Threat to jobs

The researchers then attempted to understand where threshing machines were being deployed to see if riots were unfolding in the places where adoption of the new technology was highest.  At first glance, this did indeed appear to be the case, with riots and violence tending to congregate in areas where there appeared to be a strong demand for the new technology.

Was the situation as causal and straightforward as it appears?  Threshing machines of the time were only able to operate on wheat, which despite similarities with other major cereals, was not common on English farms at the time due to the clay soil that often resulted in farmers growing cereals such as barley and rye instead.

The data suggest that farms that were producing these other cereals, and therefore deploying fewer threshing machines, also appeared to have fewer riots, which suggests that the link between the deployment of threshing machines and riots was indeed causal.

No guarantee of unrest

It should be said that the presence of the new threshing machines was not a guarantee of violent unrest.  For instance, when farms were situated relatively near to the rapidly-growing towns that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, these areas didn’t see anywhere near as much trouble.  This was almost certainly due to the ready availability of jobs in these burgeoning towns.

Instead, it tended to be the areas that were relatively far from these new industrial towns that saw significant unrest because these areas had so few alternative forms of employment available.

The results do indeed support the view that if people’s livelihoods are threatened by new technologies, they are unlikely to sit idly by and suffer in silence.  We have already seen growing discontent with the declining share of wealth going towards labor across much of the developed world, despite being at a relatively early stage in any mass disruption of the labor market.

The study also clearly highlights how important it is to also provide people with alternative forms of employment they can go into.  This has been somewhat harder, especially among lower-skilled, routine jobs for which the only real port in the storm has been the kind of highly insecure gig economy and zero-hours work that does little to provide people with stability in their life.  Largely gone are the days when low-skilled people could readily get a job in factories across the land, and so if society is to avoid the violent unrest of old, you sense that much more needs to be done to upskill the population to move up the value chain.  It’s a challenge that society has largely neglected to tackle thus far, but it’s one it can’t continue to overlook.

In the meantime, if we want to know where unrest might unfold during the 4th industrial revolution, we may now have a few pointers as to where to look.