The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
But another and far less kindly sort of slavery also arose in the old
civilization, and that was gang slavery. If it did not figure very
largely in the cities, it was very much in evidence elsewhere. The king
was, to begin with, the chief _entrepreneur_. He made the canals and
organized the irrigation (_e.g._ Hammurabi’s enterprises noted in the
previous chapter). He exploited mines. He seems (at Cnossos, _e.g._) to
have organized manufactures for export. The Pharaohs of the 1st Dynasty
were already working the copper and turquoise mines in the peninsula of
Sinai. For many such purposes gangs of captives were cheaper and far
more controllable than levies of the king’s own people. From an early
period, too, captives may have tugged the oars of the galleys, though
Torr (_Ancient Ships_) notes that up to the age of Pericles (450 B.C.)
the free Athenians were not above this task. And the monarch also found
slaves convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted men;
they did not fret to go home, because they had no homes to go to. The
Pharaohs hunted slaves in Nubia, in order to have black troops for their
Syrian expeditions. Closely allied to such slave troops were the
mercenary barbaric troops the monarchs caught into their service, not by
positive compulsion, but by the bribes of food and plunder and under the
pressure of need. As the old civilization developed, these mercenary
armies replaced the national levies of the old order more and more, and
servile gang labour became a more and more important and significant
factor in the economic system. From mines and canal and wall building,
the servile gang spread into cultivation. Nobles and temples adopted the
gang slave system for their works. Plantation gangs began to oust the
patch cultivation of the labourer-serf in the case of some staple
products....
§ 3
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