Industrial conflict as a source of technical innovation: three cases

This article is concerned with the history and theory of technical change. The central problems in this area involve explaining not simply the general propensity of the capitalist economy to technical development, but also the impulses to specific lines of technical advance: why, for example, are some production processes subject to innovation while others are not? Why does the urgency with which possible innovations are examined differ between processes? There are a wide range of possible explanations here. This article explores one of them: it argues that industrial conflict can generate or focus technical change in production processes which are prone to such conflict. This relationship is demonstrated concretely by reference to three textile process innovations in the nineteenth-century British economy.