Brokers and ship captains sent thousands of people from the British Isles to work in the English American colonies without indentures. These immigrants only entered written contracts after arrival. Here – and in other labor arrangements in England – the concept of “enticement” dominated. Subordinates’ consent to serve was imagined to be the result of campaigns of temptation to which they succumbed. While previous studies of enticement in early modern England have been limited to sexual seduction, at the time enticement also meant servant poaching. Claims of enticement allowed commentators to emphasize the power of personal interactions in servant procurement, instead of drawing attention to the structural conditions that made a segment of society disproportionately vulnerable to abuse by illicit brokers denounced as "spirits."

From the 1610s in London, servant brokers, merchants, and eventually justices of the peace and their clerks recorded consent to transatlantic colonial indentured servitude with heightened attention. In doing so, they were responding to the vastness of the distances servants crossed, compounded with the multi-year length of their contractual terms and the unlikeliness of the servants returning home. The assignability of these contracts further differentiated them from the contemporaneous forms of indentured labor. In this newer system, contracts more often specified the voluntary nature of servants’ agreement with a free will clause, precisely because their willingness seemed implausible. The treatment of different categories of recruits, including adults, children, convicts, and paupers, are compared. Unwilling recruits could sometimes secure their release before the ships departed England. Sealed indentures made escape far less achievable.