In a recent forum on slavery, Rebecca Scott, the historian of Atlantic slavery draws our attention to the tension between the social facts of diverse forms of bondage and the absolute legal distinction between slavery and free labor that undergirded Anglophone legal doctrine. Frederick Cooper among others has highlighted the thin line that existed between slavery and freedom in East Africa. Johan Mathew and Matthew Hopper, historians of the migration of bonded labor across the Western Indian Ocean have shown that British imperial officials dealing with slaves who sought manumission on Persian and Arabian sea ports, found it difficult to distinguish between different forms of bonded servile labor and slavery. Despite the difficultly accessing the subjecthood of bonded laborers, Ehud Toledano and Eve Trout Powell have tried to portray enslaved people’s experience in the Ottoman Empire. My presentation will tease out the tension between bonded labor and slavery by focusing on the documentation of bonded migrant labor from East Africa, Iran and parts of the Arabian Peninsula in the pearl fisheries of Bahrain and Kuwait and the docks of Basra during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Basra docks case, representatives of foreign commercial companies as well as British occupying forces, drew on a pool of bonded migrant labor that was often characterized in British official discourse as “coolie” labor. By comparing the differences in the manner by which officials documented and regulated these diverse forms of bonded labor, I hope to flesh out the ways that certain forms of bondage, such as forced labor for purposes of war, were sanctioned while others, such as slavery, were outlawed. I ask two questions: To what extent did the documentation of bonded labor shape official discourses on the regulation of labor (free and bonded); and how did bonded laborers themselves navigate the competing claims of jurisdiction by regional and imperial actors, including ship captains, to claim a certain subjecthood that allows them to jettison their bonded status. I examine manumission documents, Ottoman sources on regulation of labor migration and slavery in the Gulf, Arabic press and memoirs, British regulation of pearl fishing in the Persian Gulf and British documents on the recruitment of bonded labor on the infrastructural development on the docks of Basra during and immediately after the First World War. . --