Indebtedness and slaving are protean practices that straddle boundaries, respectively, within and between communities. Fathoming the relationship between debt and slavery in a wide comparative perspective requires a consideration of both historical specificity and the extent to which cultures are porous, malleable and may reciprocally inform each other as well as misinterpret each other, both historically and coevally.

As M. I. Finley and Gyan Prakash have expounded, debt has entailed servitude or bondage only under particular historical and cultural conditions. In writing about ancient Greece, Finley noted that ‘it was only between classes, between rich and poor, to put it in loose and simple terms, that debt led to bondage’, and that bondage was a condition of the loan rather than a punishment for default. Revisiting Finley's thesis, Prakash underscored that ‘[i]t was not the power of money that bonded people but the fact that persons advancing and receiving money were of unequal ranks’, and then elaborated that ‘debt bondage's claim to universality is untenable’. Rather than being ‘ontological facts’, Prakash explained that the theory of a natural state of freedom cancelled by monetary debt contains key constituents of the hegemony of Enlightenment political philosophy and bourgeois capitalism, both of which are historically specific and culturally rooted in Europe (or, as some put it, the West).