Should-Read: Bruno Caprettini and Joachim Voth: Rage against the machines: New technology and violent unrest in industrialising Britain

Should-Read: Bruno Caprettini and Joachim Voth: Rage against the machines: New technology and violent unrest in industrialising Britain: “New machines have increasingly replaced humans… http://voxeu.org/article/rage-against-machines-new-technology-and-violent-unrest

…even advanced tasks like speech recognition and translation can now be performed by relatively cheap computers and smartphones. This column describes how labour-saving technology appeared to play a key role in one of the most dramatic cases of labour unrest in recent history–the Swing riots in England during the 1830s–serving as a reminder of how disruptive new, labour-saving technologies can be in economic, social, and political terms…