What are the social preconditions for division of labour, when compared in different emerging civilizations?
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I believe division of labor is almost as old as humanity itself. Consider the following:
- Almost immediately we have division of labor between men and women, since only women can give birth and only women can breast feed.
- There would be a division of labor between the young and old, with the younger people going out hunting and the older people becoming village elders
- Shamans and priests are almost as old as human civilization itself as attested by cave paintings which definitely show a religious character
- Tool making is almost as old as humanity itself and it would stand to reason that some would be better than others at making tools (manual dexterity, intelligence etc.) and so would be the chief tool makers
- Pottery also seems to be a very old art, with fragments found in many old archeological sites, and again it would stand to reason that some would be better than others.
So my argument here is that division of labor must have started very early at the clan or small village level, tens of thousands of years ago, and that with time only its complexity grew.
So moving on from these basic division we come to trade. Consider that in the age of agriculture two kinds of commodities would be in demand: 1. Food 2. Materials
These two things would then depend on geography. One place would have copper, another iron, another good clay for pottery, another would be good for wheat, and yet another would have fruits. So at this point trade had started. It has been shown that trade in fact is very old and that often items from one culture have been dug out in archeological sites thousands of miles away. So trade would then lead to the next level of specialization, that of whole town, cities or regions in specific items. So trade would be the next prerequisite. A small point here: trade does not necessarily imply that one person would travel thousands of miles; it could instead consist of dozens of smaller journeys from one merchant to another, with goods taking many years to get from one place to another.
Yet trade would then impose another requirement, that of security, as in the ability to actually make it from one place to another profitably, and this would then explain one of the motivations for empire building: namely the pursuit of wealth.
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