In different accounts Marx says that he was struggling with the ideas of labour and exchange, until he made the distinction between labour and labour power. I got the impression that 'labour power' was Marx's own coinage. So I was a bit surprised, when reading the the Anti Slavery Reporter for Nov 1858, a paper by the secretary of the Anti Slavery Society, read at the Second Annual Conference for the Promotion of Social Science, a confident reference to the 'labour power' of the emancipated West Indians. Chamerovzow was radical, but I think knew nothing of Marx, certainly not in 1858. His audience would not have, either. Was the concept of Labour Power actually just well known, and Marx used it?