Bondage by Degree: From Chattel to Wage Slavery in Seventeenth-Century English Thought

This paper seeks to provide a framework to understand how institutions of bondage were perceived in the seventeenth century, focusing centrally on the ambiguities and nascent distinctions that arose in the wage-labour discourse. Many assumed that the emergence of wage labour was simply a novel reiteration of classical institutions of bondage. While there was a great deal of ambiguity around how institutions of domination were characterised, there was widespread agreement that wage-compensated labour was a form of bondage. There were meaningful differences to be made between captive slavery and wage labour, but these were almost universally understood to be differences in degree rather than in kind. This paper identifies three interrelated literatures that help to illuminate how wage labour was perceived in this period: texts on political economy and legal treatises; servant manuals and devotional literature, and finally, natural law theory. These discourses help to show that wage-compensated labour was understood to be a lesser form of bondage, one bound by different terms and conditions than captive slavery. Despite its differences to other forms of servitude, wage labour was clearly located on the same spectrum of bondage by degree.