Expansion of empires and the civilizations which they developed entailed military operations. Military operations, in their turn, produced war-captives, who must earn their keep and, if possible, something more. Sold in the market to the highest bidder, war captives and their descendants became chattel slaves. As civilizations were expanded by conquest and matured by struggle, they developed some type of forced labor to balance the increased parasitism of the masters and the growing numbers who were called upon to produce "services" rather than material goods.
Certain areas of civilized economies were taken over by the public authorities. Planning and building of cities and their ports, of highways, including bridges, of viaducts, aqueducts, of drainages for the cities, of public buildings. The construction of defenses, including city walls, were partly or wholly public enterprises. Temples and tombs for the mighty were often in the same category.
Maintenance of large elaborate households by political leaders, and in later periods of empire building, by the successful merchants and technicians, led to the employment of many servants, including subordinate members and relatives of the elite.
Much necessary labor was performed by members of each household. The resulting economy was therefore fragmented at the household level with virtually all of the energy supplied by human beings and domestic animals.
As each civilization developed its pattern of forced labor, including the labor of war captives, it launched the deadly competition between freemen and slaves which almost inevitably ended in favor of the slaves, who were housed and fed by the masters and who could operate at overhead costs lower than those involved in the hiring of wage or salaried workers.
Land ownership tended to center in the political-military leaders, the temples and, as each civilization matured, in the hands of its bourgeoisie.
Integrating such economies proved to be a difficult, arduous task, well beyond the powers of the average political, military or hereditary leader. In a very real sense, the problems of management were extremely personal and correspondingly concentrated in the hands of skillful acquisitors. Nowhere was the impact of the 1750-1970 revolution more far reaching than in the area of management.