The Forgotten Slaves
Found this article today. An interesting read:
The history of the African slave trade into the Americas is one that is well-documented as well as largely taught in American schools today.However, as John Martin of the Montreal-based Center for Research and Globalization points out in his article The Irish Slave Trade The Forgotten White Slaves, it was not just Africans who were traded as slaves.
Indeed, the Irish have a gruesome history as being traded as slaves as well and subjected to similar and sometimes worse treatment than their African contemporaries of the time.
Strangely though, the history of Irish and white slavery is by and large ignored in the American educational curriculum today.
In his article, John Martin writes The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70 percent of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Further, the treatment of Irish slaves was thought to be more cruel than that of African slaves. If an Irish slave was beaten by their owner, it wasnt considered to be a crime.The Irish were further exploited when the British began to breed Irish women or girls, sometimes as young as 12 with African males.
These new mulatto slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale. In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
Martin concludes, In 1839, Britain finally decided on its own to end its participation in Satans highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.
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Not sure why, but I'm always surprised at Man's inhumanity towards man. That being said, this history also needs to be part of what we teach our children, in hopes of the scourge of slavery never happening again.....and making sure that the current trade in this world comes to an end.
Excellent find Gary. Amazing how there are so many stories that folks don't know about - and this is one of them.
Thanks.
I remember some of this from my old college days long ago. Thanks for finding this.
This is simple. Just don't believe it.
I only read the article, not the website it was hosted on. The article goes on to say that the 'Indentured Servitude' was really not the right name for the vast majority of those Irish that were forcibly removed and sold to colonists in the West Indies.
O.K., now you've fully examined the website this article is on, now is the time to return to the seeded article. If you want to write a scholarly article on the pros and cons of the website itself, do it elsewhere.
Let Me Google That For You -
Abhorrent, but nonetheless an apples and oranges comparison to African slavery. I believe there is a difference between showing up and rounding up innocent people to be sold into slavery, and buying up prisoners to be sold into slavery. We extract labor from prisoners in the US to this day, albeit in a much more humane way than what the Irish went through.
Folks....
When in doubt go to google scholar.
I did find a book confirming that indeed there were Irish slaves in the New World Islands.
The book is called
Banished and Forgotten
By Louise Gherasim
This was the only citation I could find, but that doesn't mean there are not others.
That book was a novel . It was supposed to be based on history but since it was fictional there is no way to tell how accurate it is ...
However , there does seem to be a definite history for the "black Irish" . That might be the strongest evidence .
If you had gotten to know kpr from the vine you would be more familiar with that history . He is an ancestor of that bunch . And if I'm not mistaken , there was even a TV series about the modern day black Irish .
And feel free to be a pain any time the spirit moves you !
The 30,000 Irish were by and large "innocent" and included minors. They lost a war, just like many of the African slaves were slaves because they lost wars to stronger African tribes. I don't see how the Irish were any more deserving of their fate than the Africans.
Flogging Molly did a song tocommemoratethe slaves:
Twas 1659 forgotten now for sure
They dragged us from our homeland
With the musket and their gun
Cromwell and his roundheads
Battered all we know
Shackled hopes of freedom
We're now but stolen goods
Darken the horizon
Blackened from the sun
This rotten cage of Bridgetown
Is where I now belong
All to hell we must sail
For the Shores of sweet Barbados
Where the sugar cane grows taller
Than the god we once believed in
Till the butcher and his crown
Raped the land we used to sleep in
Now tommorow chimes of ghostly crimes
That haunt Tobacco Island
Red leg down a peg
Blistered burns the soul
The floggings they're a plenty
But reasons there are none
Our backs belong to landlords
Where branded is there name
Paid for with ten shillings
Cheap labor never breaks
The silver moon is shinin'
Cools the copper blood
Where the livin' meet the dead
And together dance as one
The author has a point. There is a tendency to in America to festishize African slavery as some sort of horrific outlier. But the truth is slavery is a nearly universal phenomena throughout human history. If history tells us one thing, its that humanity is much more likely to brutalize and exploit his fellow man than not. We're lucky enough to live in a world where slavery has basically been extinct for almost 200 years, but that's a drop in the bucket of human history. Slavery touched all cultures and all parts of the world.
Teaching the truth about the ubiquity of slavery throughout history is essential for students to understand the truth about human nature.
The thing about kpr is many of his vine friends would not comment on his articles . I made it a point to do so even though they usually involved very ugly topics ... and hard to get through . As a result he confided things to me that he did not do with everyone .
Judging by this entry :
it appears there is some credence to your statement that the genetics of the Black_Irish were Iberian .
Since slavery is still alive & thriving in Africa today what does that say about the racial basis for it ?
Petey,
Robert is right. I have always had a thing for Irish boys and learned a lot about their history from them. And finding out that Robert is Irish, explains so much. I've always felt like I was talking to my ex-boyfriend Jim when I talk to him.
ex being the operative word.
Like I said, it's abhorrent either way. I don't claim to know all the details of Irish slaves. My comment is more generalized in the differences in how the two types of slavery are couched in historical terms. African slaves are not described as prisoners, whereas the Irish ones are. While the means by which the Irish were imprisoned is obviously a factor, the fact that they were already imprisoned implies that they weren't necessarily imprisoned for the direct purposes of sale into slavery. When we hear about African slavery, it's more along the lines of slavedealers showing up and plucking Africans off the land by use of force.