As agrarian relations were objectified in land, the kamias were subjected to a variety of practices that defined and documented them as persons who had lost their natural rights to freedom because of the innate power of money, grain, and land that they received from the maliks. Through the juridical representation of debt-bondage, the power of things enveloped the kamias into an economy of suspended rights, and turned them into bonded laborers. This development was emblematic of a profound historical transformation that first established freedom as the essence of humanity and then denied it to the kamias. The violence done to the kamias in this process did not originate in the translation of an indigenous term into English.