Abstract
Chattel slavery has not always been the alternate of free labor, as it appears these days. Indeed, different forms of dependency has seen through many centuries and including the early modern period. People were not simply slaves or free men, and different intermediary status existed in many societies: from the so-called contract labor, also known as indenture labor, to convict labor and even serfdom. Slavery was not as simple as people perceived it. For instance, serfs did not usually consider themselves as slaves. Jerome Blum illustrates this idea when he writes about the Russian serfs of the eighteenth century:
