This paper examines colonial reports, legal cases, and judicial decisions following the legal abolition of slavery in India – enacted by the Indian Slave Act of 1843. Examining documents collected from both the India Office Records at the British Library, as well as on the ground in Sindh, Pakistan, this paper traces the process whereby slavery comes to be defined vis-à-vis the multiple varieties of social and labor relationships that characterized Indian society. Situating this process as part of the global, order making goals of empire, this paper examines the legal codification of categories in general, and “slavery” and “free” labor in particular. Focusing on the coastal region of Sindh, embedded in Indian Ocean slave trade networks, of good, ideas, and of course, peoples, gives us fresh analytical insight into how this definition emerges relationally, providing a case where multiple “slaveries” coexisted, overlapped, and were worked out. Two figures and tropes emerge from these cases: the native Indian bondsman, and the foreign African slave. What role does “race” play in the visibility or lack thereof of conditions of servitude, dictating which side of the moral boundary they fall on separating the free from the unfree? How do these distinctions become enshrined in law in this crucial post abolition moment? In addition, by focusing on depositions of slaves, attentiveness to the identities of litigants, and the narratives of witnesses, I interrogate the extent to which these cases might be able to uncover a social history of the experience of slaves both within India, and those traversing the wider Indian Ocean region.