News flash: I'm going to Australia in February, so this Web site may be switched off at any time.
"Luddite" is used these days to refer to someone who thinks modern technology is a problem, which I do. The word comes from the name of a social movement that doesn't have much to do with the modern usage, though.
The Luddites were active around 1810-1814, primarily in Yorkshire (following very similar and almost certainly related groups a fews years earlier based around Nottinghamshire). They were organised secretly because of government persecution.
The Luddites opposed certain trade practices associated with early capitalism in the weaving industry, most notably:
Not all employers did these things: the Luddite struggle was an attempt to make the worst employers behave as well as the others.
At the time that the Luddite revolution started, the new practices were illegal, but the government was very definitely on the side of the employers: the law was ignored at first, and gradually but effectively changed in their favour.
The Luddites are famous for smashing machinery. They would assemble in large but well organised gangs, disguised, and get rid of the new large looms an employer was using as an excuse to reduce quality and prices. They'd threaten the owner with repeated action and personal injury if he didn't do what they wanted, but they didn't in fact harm the owners in the riots. The Luddites did perpetrate one murder and one attempted murder, separately from the riots, and the murder seems to have been the main cause of the movement's decline. On the other hand, several Luddites were killed by owners and police, and the murder was partly out of revenge for the killing and probably torture of two Luddites.
Since the Luddites were organised secretly, I don't think we know whether they didn't want to hurt the owners out of Christianity, or whether they were making sure the owners got no public sympathy, or whether they were scared of the social disruption that would come if they killed people. The events make all three motivations plausible, and I suppose all three were there.
The main difference between the original and modern usages of "Luddite" is that the real Luddites were objecting to work practices and laws, not technology. They smashed frames because it was a very effective way of scaring the capitalists without hurting them.
There was very little new technology involved, anyway: we're only talking about extra-large looms and cropping shears, not automation or big factories or steam power. But the technology was being used as one excuse for a social reorganisation that was devastating to most people in the north of England. There were other, political, causes of industrial change that were more important than the technological causes: most obviously, the effects of the revolution of 1688, and the English aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution, which allowed the government to demonise its ideological opponents as "Jacobins".
The Jacobin tag apparently prevented opposition in the House of Commons. Byron made an interesting speech in the Lord's about Luddism: the full text is in Hansard.
I don't have time to write a lot about this now, but a good thing to read is Luddism: a revolution that failed by Laura Salvadori and Claudio Villi: this is the best book I know to start with
E.P. Thompson's The making of the English working class (Penguin, London) is the standard work on the social context of the time, and as far as I can tell without actually reading it it's wonderful. It's long, and only has a bit about Luddism.