Mainstream Western culture has viewed slave labour on the one hand and free or wage labour on the other as polar opposites since at least the eighteenth century, from the time that abolitionism became a major political force. If the legal distinction between slave and non-slave status has usually been clear, differences in the day-to-day experiences of workers under different labour regimes are often less obvious. Indeed, for some any distinction between slave and waged labour is spurious in that industrialisation brought wage slavery to the developed world. For others the ending of slavery in the West Indies may not have brought industrialization, but it certainly saw the continuation of restrictions on labour. From these standpoints emancipation was something less than a watershed. 1 It is, however, possible to get a different view of the slavefree polarity and where English and West Indian societies lie in relationship to it, if we focus on attitudes to labour in the seventeenth century, both elite and non-elite, colonial and domestic.