Pawnship was a legal category of social and economic dependency in which a person was held as collateral for a loan. Pawning of individuals constituted the transfer of productive assets as security until the debt was fully repaid. Pawnship stands in contrast to a mortgage, where assets are only transferred in case of default. The labour of the pawn, at least in non-Muslim settings, constituted interest on the debt and theoretically was intended to cover the cost of subsistence and accommodation but did not contribute to the principal. Usually, the pawn lived with the creditor, who was responsible for subsistence. Commercial hostage-taking was an extension of pawning, in which one or more individuals were held as security for a debt or an expected payment. In West Africa, pawnship derived from the concept in which something, or as was often the case, someone, is held as collateral for a debt. The way pawning operated was different than the pawn shop as a place where an individual can receive a loan against a valuable object, such as jewellery, but with the possibility that the pawned object can be sold after a specified period of time if the loan is not repaid. The use of human beings for this purpose was contested and subsequently declared illegal, following the League of Nations enquiries in the 1920s.