Week 5 suggested essay topic:

Did popular resistance to mechanisation - machine breaking - have a greater impact in Britain or France? As usual, feel free to improvise your own topic related to technical change, or economically-motivated protests. You will find interesting material on "bread riots" and the specifically French episode of the "Flour War" of 1775.

Here are some readings specifically on machine breaking and popular protest.

Caprettini, Bruno, and Hans-Joachim Voth, "Rage Against the Machines: Labour-Saving Technology and Unrest in England, 1830-32," CEPR Discussion Paper DP11800 (2017).

Hobsbawm, Eric and George Rude, Captain Swing. London: Penguin, 1969.

Horn, Jeff, "Machine-Breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution," Labour / Le Travail, vol. 55 (2005), pp. 143-66.

--- , "'A Beautiful Madness': Privilege, the Machine Question and Industrial Development in Normandy in 1789," Past and Present, no. 217 (Nov. 2012), pp. 149-85.

--- , "Avoiding Revolution: the French Path to Industrialization," Ch. 5 in Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution, J. Horn, N. Rosenband, and M. Roe Smith, eds. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 87-106.

--- , The Path not Taken. French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Jarrige, François, and Sian Reynolds, "Gender and machine-breaking," Clio. Women, Gender, History, no. 38 (2013), pp. 15-37.

Nuvolari, Alessandro, "The 'Machine Breakers' and the Industrial Revolution," Journal of European Economic History, vol. 31 no. 1 (2002), pp. 393-426.

Reilly, Tim, " 'The cropper lads': Rural Luddism and the 'end of negotiation' in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1812-1813," University of Oxford BA thesis, 2019. Nice maps, good references, interesting story. Available from me if not in library.

Roberts, Matthew, "Rural Luddism and the Makeshift Economy of of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters," Social History, vol. 42, no. 3 (2017), pp. 365-98. Useful references here to local and social history on Luddism.

Rude, George, The Crowd in History. London: Wiley and Sons, 2005 [orig. 1964]. The chapter structure should make this easy to use. There have been a number of editions, all ok. Rude has other relevant books, such as The Crowd in the French Revolution or Captain Swing.

Thompson, E.P., "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, vol. 50 (1971), pp. 76-136. A classic, about bread riots rather than machine-breaking, but potentially relevant if you choose your own topic.

--- , The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1991 [orig. 1963]. Another classic. A massive volume useful as a reference, accessible via its index.