The transformation of humans into moral beings in the context of modern slavery was a process that fundamentally involved labour. The abolitionists and the apologists for slavery both tended to assume that slave and wage labour were two separate systems, although they drew the line between them in different places. This chapter returns to the themes of humanity, race and empire and explores how they were caught up with the emerging binary between slavery and free labour. It brings us back to the debates between antislavery writers and those who came to the defence of slavery in the late eighteenth century, before the slave trade was abolished. The arguments between them help to illuminate the ways in which constructions of race and labour were inextricable from one another, and how thinking about slavery as a labour system is inseparable from understanding freedom as a contested concept, forged out of experience and struggle. Part of that struggle was about trying to find and define the limits of enslavability, and its location in a constellation of concepts of self-possession, labour power, race and property. As Emma Christopher puts it, these issues were central to the ‘prolonged fight over who would be eligible for freedom’ (Christopher 2006, 6). This chapter explores how that notion of ‘freedom’ came to be associated with the West, with capitalism and with ‘the contractual relation between worker and employer as the natural and ordained condition of production’ (Pleasants 2008, 206).

As we have seen, this was a struggle and a conflict that took place within modernity. As O’Connell Davidson argues, it is important to recognise that transatlantic plantation slavery was and is ‘modern slavery’. Plantation agriculture ‘resembled factories in the field and, with its carefully structured gang labour, anticipated in many ways the assembly lines and agribusiness of the future’ (D. B. Davis 2006, 6). Slave economies were at the core of industrialisation and commercialisation, contributing to British economic growth and the development of manufacturing and ‘causally entwined with the emergence and consolidation of capitalism as the dominant worldwide social, economic and political system’ (Pleasants 2008, 205).