History of labour law concerns the development of labour law as a way of regulating and improving the life of people at work. In the great civilisations of antiquity there were great aggregations of labour which was not solely, though frequently it was predominantly, slave labour. Some of the features of manufacture and mining on a great scale arose, producing the same sort of evils and industrial maladies known and regulated in our own times. Some of the maladies were described by Pliny and classed as " diseases of slaves." And he gave descriptions of processes, for example in the metal trades, as belonging entirely to his own day, which modern archaeological discoveries trace back through the earliest known Aryan civilisations to a prehistoric origin in the East, and which have never died out in western Europe, but can be traced in a concentrated manufacture with almost unchanged methods, now in France, now in Germany, now in England.
While much, and in some civilisations most, of the labour was compulsory or forced, it is clear that too much has been sometimes assumed, and it is by no means certain that even the pyramids of Egypt, much less the beautiful earliest Egyptian products in metalworking, weaving and other skilled craft work, were typical products of slave labour. Even in Rome it was only at times that the proportion of slaves valued as property was greater than that of hired workers, or, apart from capture in war or self-surrender in discharge of a debt, that purchase of slaves by the trader, manufacturer or agriculturist was generally considered the cheapest means of securing labour. As in early England the various stages of village industrial life, medieval town manufacture, and organisation in craft guilds, and the beginnings of mercantilism, were parallel with a greater or less prevalence of serfdom and even with the presence in part of slavery, so in other ages and civilisations the various methods of organisation of labour are found to some extent together. The Germans in their primitive settlements were accustomed to the notion of slavery, and in the decline of the Roman Empire, Roman captives from among the most useful craftsmen were carried away by their northern conquerors.
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