In 1768, oarmaker David Stideford of Plymouth Dockyard angrily petitioned the Navy Board, the committee that had charge over shipbuilding, demanding he be allowed his “Chipps.” This was a term for waste wood that shipbuilding workers were allowed to take out of the dockyard. Stideford was angry that the porter who controlled the dockyard gate had stopped him from taking his chips out. They even let people in at night! Lowly treenail makers (a much less respected line of work), even! Stideford bitterly nsisted that oarmakers had been allowed chips “ever since there was an oarmaker.” Who was this porter to deny him his chips now?

Stideford’s case is one of the many featured in my not-so-distant book Enemies of Order_, and a good place to start with a complicated question: what was the place of artisans in the working class, and what does that mean for us now? Obviously a short blog post is not going to give a single clear answer for all cases, and if I had one I would not put it behind a paywall. But I want to think about it a little, through a couple of tales of eighteenth-century oarmakers, and some analogies to certain categories of workers today. 

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Early modern artisans had pride as laborers. Plenty of people take pride in their work, but not everyone does, particularly in an era where most people were still peasants. It is another thing too to be proud of yourself as a particular kind of worker. That’s not just a function of skill or status. I’m proud of my work but I’m not proud of being A Professor: academia is exploitative and infuriating, and solidarity is rare. But oarmakers, tailors, shipwrights– these skilled workers referred to themselves as, collectively acted as, and expressed pride in themselves as members of, their particular trades. Early 18th-century potters collaborated to undermine newcomers who were hoarding secret techniques. Shipwrights frequently went on strike.

Artisan affinity was particular. Stideford did not appeal as a worker or an artisan but as an oarmaker. This was the category he lived in after all. “Worker” is abstract, and artisan is a convention for pairing similar categories of workers together. But “oarmaker” is a particular and identifiable economic category. Likewise for “shipwright.” Some people could build a ship that worked and some couldn’t. This trade-based identification could lead to a striking lack of solidarity. Shipwrights did not go on strike with or for ropemakers. 

But identifying as a particular trade meant drawing on the undeniable economic value of their knowledge– perhaps no foundation could be safer to build a social world atop. When Portsmouth Royal Dockyard oarmaker John Powell died, his wife took over his contract. She then used her position to protect her family. Petitioning the Navy Board directly, she asked for extra work for her son in blockmaking– and despite friction with officers at the dockyard, they seem to have granted her request. Her second husband later entered the trade too. Artisans acted within and as their trades because they provided real benefits that a more abstract class could not. 

At the same time, artisan solidarity is not reducible to material interest, not least because material interest is anything but simple. Young shipwrights acted against their current material interests when they defended seniority systems that might one day help them (materially). Artisans who did not defend other trades, which is to say most of them most of the time prior to the industrial period, were arguably putting their ideological interest in status or identity over the strategic utility of solidarity. “People were just out for themselves-” no. “Just” as in righteous is a good adjective for historians to use. Just as in merely is usually isn’t. In the space between different visions of “material interest” there is room for vast oceans of intellectual and political difference. This should be familiar to regular readers, but it bears repeating here especially. It is unusually tempting, and unusually wrong, to reduce artisan class to mere material interest. 

The ideology of a trade mattered.  It still matters. One profession that occupies a similar class position to 18th-century artisans today is the programmer/software engineer. Their work has been more disrupted by AI than anyone else’s– it may reduce pay, certainly automates their once valuable skills, and is changing every aspect of their work. In a matter of months, countless jobs have gone from handcrafting code to babysitting robots. 

This is an analogous experience to that of many artisans in the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, it was not low-value cheap labor that got automated first– partly because there were as there now are complex tasks that we don’t pay well for (cleaning is mechanically complex!) but mostly because of economics. Of course the thing that costs a lot gets replaced more quickly. In a world where historians were as ubiquitous and in-demand as programmers, I have little doubt that LLMs would be as capable of producing monographs as they are code (in the status quo, they are good at the latter and simply incapable of the former, for now). The result for artisans then was decreasing pay, longer hours, and a decline in status. I hope that’s not what’s coming for SWEs, but one could certainly conclude it is!

Yet the people in those jobs don’t seem to be revolting. It doesn’t hurt that many programmers are actually being paid well, but that’s not an explanation: the minority of university faculty who are well paid seem as upset by AI as anyone else, for instance, and there are tech workers losing jobs over this even if the net employment effect is not yet clear. Again, material interest is never simple.

Part of a fuller answer lies in the intellectual history of software engineering. While credit is important in the software world, there’s a strong culture of sharing knowledge– quite like that of, say, the potters I mentioned earlier. The open source software that serves as the foundation for so much of the technology we use daily is maintained by a strange conjuncture of philanthropy, hobby work, personal generosity, and mutual interest. Programmers generally have a capacious conception of knowledge production and intellectual property.