ABSTRACT
A recurrent theme in recent work on slavery is that the rigid boundaries of that juridical category were always blurred in practice. Within slave regimes there were always possibilities (sometimes brutally suppressed, sometimes tolerated or encouraged) for slaves to employ the bargaining strategies of 'free labour'. 1 Within societies with strong artisanal sectors, slaves might act as independent entrepreneurs. When the decay of plantation economies increased the master's incentive to allow slave participation in a wider labour market, even the juridical category could be deformed. In the Bahamas after 1800, for example, masters allowed slaves to work for wages. When masters attempted to use the slave laws to punish those who refused to turn over their wages, the Attorney General decided that only the more limited penalties of the master and servant laws applied. Slave law would only be available to masters if they denied their slaves permission to work for wages. 2
The fact that a colonial law officer could believe it possible to carve out a temporary legal status of this kind (slaves who could be controlled only by master and servant law) is a reminder that slavery was just one of many legal statuses defining employment relations in the common law world. 3 Apprentices, journeymen, labourers, indentured servants, 'industrial' immigrants, slaves and masters were the main categories, but within each there was a plethora of legal definitions at common law and in legislation, setting the limits of freedom that 'free' servants (and masters) enjoyed. 4 One of the best-studied examples of some of those differences is the use of versions of apprenticeship (1834-8) and then full master and servant law (from 1838) in the ex-slave societies of the British Caribbean. The argument in those jurisdictions about the relative severity of each legal regime is an important one. But it is also important to bear in mind that those successive legal regimes, and similar legislative changes in other slave societies that became part of the British empire, were local variations of a broad body of employment law, an immense corpus of
legislation and judicial decisions that left its mark on virtually every British possession.
