On November 9 1830, a hundred farm labourers descended on a farm in Kent in the south of England and destroyed a threshing machine with saws, hatchets and axes. At Burnham Overy in Norfolk, workers destroyed another machine as they shouted: “It keeps an honest man from getting work.” The country was in the throes of the Swing riots, where farm labourers smashed threshing machines, burnt barns, sent threatening letters to farmers and demanded higher wages. By the last 10 days of November, write historians Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, “virtually all of Southern England seemed in flames”.

The workers were responding to transformations in the world of work which had left them desperate. New threshing machines saved labour by a factor of five to 10, displacing many workers who usually relied on manual threshing jobs to keep them going in winter. Farm employment had become more casual and precarious. “It is cheaper to hire day labourers?.?.?.?than to maintain servants in the house, especially as they are always sent home on a rainy day,” one contemporary observer wrote.

We are at another moment in history where work is becoming more uncertain and insecure, at least for some. Last year, Amazon Flex drivers were hanging their smartphones in trees outside pick-up sites in an apparent attempt to try to win a split-second advantage as delivery tasks went to those closest by. On some farms in Scotland, raspberry pickers were being sent to sit in their caravans unpaid when it rained or when their productivity rate fell too low.