Contract and consent had important roles in early modern English labor relationships. The scholarship in social and economic history and legal studies has rarely tried to reconcile the legal framework of voluntariness with the practical unfreedom of early modern work. The Introduction proposes that the foundations of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in part, from the exploitative labor systems of parish apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servitude, military impressment, and prisoner of war labor. Charity, colonization, and war were the key factors that drove masters and middlemen to reach for consent as a tool to bind people into labor. The ideology of "natural laborers" justified presuming consent in people of appropriate profiles. Moments of consenting were fraught with power imbalances, and they reinscribed social hierarchies. Contemporary examples of coerced consent show an ongoing acceptance of this pairing. The legal context, chapter summaries, and a consideration of the method of historicizing consent complete the Introduction.