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This is an op-ed by Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney, and Matthew Connor Reilly. They write in response to what they call the myth of “Irish slaves” in the New World, which has recently entered the mainstream via social media.
This myth, conflating indentured servitude with racialised chattel slavery, has helped poison much of the public discourse about the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, they said.
Today, they examine what is arguably the closest point between white servitude and black slavery, mid-17th century Barbados, and conclude that even there, these two forms of unfree labour cannot be equated.
A SPURIOUS GlobalResearch.ca article, first published in 2008, claims that an “Irish slave trade” was initiated in 1612 and abolished in 1839. It states that “Irish slaves” were treated worse than African slaves.
This article, which has been shared online at least one million times, is underpinned by a conspiracy theory which claims that “biased” historians are refusing to call indentured servants “slaves” for political reasons.
The fallout has been predictable. The myth is now a favoured derailment tactic for people who wish to shut down conversations about race and slavery. Many African Americans attest to encountering this myth, in person and online.
‘White slavery’
As the conversation about reparatory justice continues in the US and the Caribbean, those who proclaim the history of “white slavery” now claim a shared heritage of victimisation. They thus aim to vindicate themselves and their ancestors from any involvement in the processes of racial inequality or oppression in the past and the present.
This, in turn, fuels racial condemnation and racist sentiment toward those who bemoan racial inequality and oppression in the twenty-first century.
Inevitably the myth gained prominence in the wake of Dylann Roof’s terrorist attack in Charleston and the subsequent debate about the Confederate flag.
One Confederate flag store owner referred to “hundreds of thousands of white slaves from Ireland and Scotland that were sent to Barbados” in a bid to deflect from the fact his ancestors fought a war to perpetually enslave millions of black Americans and their descendants.
Irish slaves?
At a Confederate flag rally in Mississippi in August a reporter was told that “even the Irish, we were slaves. At some point, you just have to get over it.”
As this notion spreads, responsible historians should be prepared to respond. We know that Europeans who were forcibly deported from England, Scotland and Ireland to the Caribbean in the mid-17th century cannot be accurately described as “slaves.” They were indentured servants.
The difference is not merely a matter of words. Colonial servitude was temporary and non-hereditary, with legal personhood, while colonial slavery was perpetual and hereditary, with sub-human legal status. Rather than academic “quibbling,” the differences between these two forms of unfree labour are of fundamental importance to our understanding of the development of chattel slavery in the British colonies.
The word ‘slave’
If we refer to two different statuses in the same historical context using the same term (“slave”) the meaning becomes conflated.
To be sure, the conditions of white servants in Barbados shocked English observers into drawing an analogy with slavery. Jerome Handler has translated the invaluable account of a French priest, Father Antoine Biet, who visited Barbados in 1654 and lamented how poorly the white servants were treated.
According to Biet, some of the white families who were deported to the colony were split up, purposefully sold to different planters as part of their punishment.
Other first-hand accounts indicate that servants were fed a relatively scant diet, were prodded with sticks if they did not work fast enough and lived in basic accommodation—all hardships that were also experienced by enslaved Africans during the same period of time.
Indentured servants in Barbados
If a white servant assaulted another servant or a slave, it was treated as a misdemeanor and they were fined. If they assaulted their master they were whipped. Their indenture was legal property therefore a servant’s remaining time could be left in wills, traded for commodities and sold. Since one’s labour is inseparable from one’s person, this meant indentured servants in Barbados were treated as a sort of commodity.
The distinction between voluntary and involuntary indentured servitude is also important, but all too often serves as justification for the existence of “white slavery”.
It is true that some Europeans, particularly prisoners of war or political prisoners, were sent to places like Barbados against their will and without a predetermined period of servitude.
However, upon arrival, those without contracts were, by law, required to serve the master who purchased their labour for a limited number of years, depending on their age. It is also true that many servants didn’t live to see the end of their period of servitude due to brutal treatment and unsparing work regimens, but while under the conditions of servitude, they were subject to the same laws that governed European servants, not enslaved Africans.
Enslaved Africans were treated as livestock
As difficult as white servants’ experiences were, however, enslaved Africans were treated as livestock. According to Ligon they were “bred” along with the “horses and cattle.“ Their right to life did not fall under English common law; it was essentially forfeit.
Enslaved Africans who assaulted any “Christian,” regardless of the white person’s status, were severely punished under assorted methods of torture. Biet notes he said saw a poor Negro woman perhaps forty years old, whose body was full of scars which she claimed had been caused by her master’s [applying] the fire-brand to her.”
In short, the earliest laws of Barbados, beginning in the 1640s and provided in detail in 1661, carefully spelled out the legal distinctions between slavery (as reserved for “Negroes”) and servitude (as reserved for Europeans).
Irish slaves narrative
Moreover, what underlines the historiographical vandalism of the “Irish slaves” narrative is that the Irish were also involved in the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans.
As Biet made his way across the island he was befriended by an Irishman who was likely an overseer on a larger plantation. In his description he said:
“He had in irons one of these poor Negroes who had stolen a pig. Every day, his hands in irons, the overseer had him whipped by the other Negroes until he was all covered with blood. The overseer, after having had him treated thus for seven or eight days, cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and forced him to eat it.”
In fact, the 1661 slave laws allowed any person in the colony (including Irish servants) to kill an enslaved African who was in the act of stealing. The killer would be rewarded with sugar and the owner would be compensated out of the public purse.
While Barbados had very few Irish planters, the colony of Montserrat is important to include in our discussions of not only the idea of the “white slave” but also the role of the Irish in the transatlantic slave trade.
As the only island in the Caribbean during this period whose white population was a majority Irish, Montserrat offers a pertinent and contained case-study in which to consider their roles and experiences.
Irishmen first arrived after being expelled by the British from St Kitts in the 1630s and they remained the major white population until at least the late 18th century. Irish people filled every level of social strata and religious persuasion on Montserrat, from indentured servant up to governor: they represented both the colonised and colonisers.
Evidence from government records, court records and private papers show that Irish landowners were often enthusiastic exploiters of the African slave trade. Their laws and court records reveal stark distinctions between the status and treatment of white indentured servants (also usually Irish) and black chattel slaves.
These distinctions matter a great deal, both then and now.
Liam Hogan, an independent scholar and librarian, tweets at @Limerick1914. Laura McAtackney (@LMcAtackney) is an associate professor in sustainable heritage management (archaeology) at Århus University, Denmark. Matthew Connor Reilly is a postdoctoral fellow in archaeology and the ancient world at Brown University.
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They were sent against their will, they were bought and sold. Forced to work, treated badly, and may not survive long enough to see their freedom. But it was not slavery because the Africans had it worse? Sound to me like we had a better job title but the same f€ckin job
I remember reading a book on this subject a few years ago.
To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan
It is a very good read for anybody who is interested.
The book to hell or Barbados has been debunked
The first slaves to the Carribean were Irish, shipped there by Cromwell.
Ireland was the ‘laboratory’ for British colonial expansion.
All of the techniques used by the British to conquer territory worldwide (such as plantation) were developed in Ireland
Zoe Daly, it was James 11 who was responsible for the first Irish slaves, when he sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His proclamation of 1625 required Irish prisoners to be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
In one single decade from 1641 to 1652, the Irish population fell from 1.5 million to 600,000.
James II wasn’t born until 1633.
True, Dave.
Then when it grew back, they purged again and again.
Is that why the majority of the population are so docile – genetic selection from continuous artificial extinction events?
Why the fear of stating that whites were also enslaved? I am so sick of this white guilt PC phenomenon that has infected people. Acknowledging the fact that white irish were enslaved doesn’t detract from the fact black Africans were enslaved in any way. The word slave is rooted in the word ‘slav’, Slav being a distinct grouping of people originating from eastern Europe. Oliver Cromwell sent 1000′s of irish to Barbados of all places yet the authors make no mention of this, why? They weren’t sent on a holiday. They were sent to work sugar plantations for the rest of their lives. If that isn’t slavery then what is? Surely it cannot be considered racist to say that there were white slaves. The origin of the word ‘redneck’ is believed to have come from the fact that pale skinned irish burnt very easily & quickly under the Caribbean sun (obviously our summers were crap back then too). This article is unbalanced & wants to rewrite history. If we attempted to belittle the experience & suffering experienced by black Africans who were slaves there would quite rightly be uproar so don’t do the same to a part of our history some prefer to see hidden. Slavery is slavery no matter the colour of those wearing the chains & those who facilitated it were only interested in green (gold).
The Irish sent to Barbados were released in what the Brits call ‘the restoration’ i.e. when Charles II took the throne, and they were never chattel slaves.
No one deny’s that there were not Irish in the Caribbean including a layer of Irish slavers and plantation owners. But the ‘Irish were slaves too’ claim is misleading at best
Andrew, it goes back to James 11′s time when he SOLD Irish prisoners to the New World. If you are sold you are a slave. No amount of dancing around words or splitting hairs will change it.
I think you mean James I.
White slavery existed. Millions of white Europeans from Eastern and Western Europe were taken by the Ottomons, the Barabary states and the Golden Horde. That is indisputable fact.
The Muslim raid on Baltimore being the tip of the iceberg.
“Having sailed for two months and with little to show for the voyage, Janszoon turned to a captive taken on the voyage, a Roman Catholic named John Hackett, for information on where a profitable raid could be made. The residents of Baltimore, a small town in West Cork, Ireland, were resented by the Roman Catholic native Irish because they were settled on lands confiscated from the O’Driscoll clan. Hackett would direct Janszoon to this town and away from his own. Janszoon sacked Baltimore on June 20, 1631, seizing little more than 108 persons whom he doomed to be sold as slaves in north Africa. Janszoon took no interest in the Gaels and released them, only enslaving English.”
The planters of Baltimore got a taste of their own medicine if you ask me.
Facts don’t matter; the intention is to spread White guilt.
Then again we did steal St Patrick from Wales, everyone was at it at some stage.
But remember only whites are evil, tis why we all have to go, and be replaced via immigration and the new rapugees
Even the word ‘slave’ come from a baltic or eastern european ‘slavic’???
1.
a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant.
2.
a person entirely under the domination of some influence or person:
The Irish were slaves. Not as bad as the Africans but slaves nonetheless
@Sertorius: Agreed. Barbary Pirates cruised the coasts of Britain. The Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thyomas Wentworth had all of his goods nicked by the Pirates.
You may not like this, but Oliver Cromwell started a fund to free Christian Slaves from pirates.
The authors are completely missing the point. If one is not free to leave and seek other employment, then one is a slave.
Exactly, I doubt the “indentured servants” would have cared about the fact that the law defined them slightly differently to slaves.
They were still living the life of slaves, the semantics of legal terms doesn’t diminish what they experienced, and for the authors to try and suggest that is reprehensible.
Typical Brit apologists with a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome.
Funny how they omit this:
“As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. 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.”
Our cousins were treated worse than the Africans, along with their being totally unsuited to the climate of the Caribbean.
Can I ask what book or article that’s from?
This “forced breeding” narrative is a racist myth.
https://medium.com/@Limerick1914/the-racist-myth-within-a-racist-myth-8eac2c890e92#.99an1uoml
I’m not sure why you’re searching months old comments to reply to other than to drive traffic to your blog though I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the Irish weren’t slaves. Perhaps many were not. Though their legal definition would have been of little bearing on their reality. If you sought discussion I might have been happy to entertain it though sending a link to a five part series of articles while calling a not particularly widely held belief a racist myth isn’t likely to inspire it. Your article seems only to show exaggeration of the overall claim of Irish slavery. Not debunking as you say. That and the fact that it’s tagged as related to the blacklivesmatter movement has me questioning your motives. To create an accurate account of Irish history and the difficulties faced by the Irish people is fine. Even if that diminishes their suffering in the eyes of history. To attempt to erase that suffering on a technicality as you appear to do. That’s racism.
Or a prisoner
@Liam Hogan:
We have your number,Hogan!
You are working in:
Limerick City Library
Public Library
The Granary,
Michael St
Limerick.
(061) 407 510
@Daphne: There was a difference. Scots who went to Massachusetts as indentured Servants would serve 5 or seven years and then, they would become free men. The laws of Boston said that the Master should provide shelter and the means to earn a living. In a number of cases, the Master bought himself and the Servant out of the contract because the servant was of such use to him that he would employ him on a formal basis.
The Irish in the Barbadoes fared less well but they were still Indentured servants who, unfortunately didn’t know what to do with themselves when the Indentureship ended.
People keep on saying that the English killing of the Irish was from 1641 but it wasn’t. It was a bloody civil war with people changing sides. Tens of thousands of Irish, both Protestant and Catholic died between 1641 and 1658,
The Scots with the necessary nous and the Irish with similar nous were successful slavers.
The Scots had first hand experience of Slavery in their own country. Colliers and Salters were bound to their masters without the opportunity to be free. Their Children would be similarly enslaved. 1602 to 1799.
All u have to do is go to an island called Grenada, amazing place, 100% black population, president is a Flanagan, airport is Sister Foley airport I think, everybody has irish names like Shannon or Aoife, I asked Shannon is her name irish but she had no idea of her islands history or even who the irish were
Irish slaves were sent there by the British from galway to pick sugar, and of course they re-populated the place!
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Barbados and other Carribean Islands like Antigua were penal colonies in the centuries before Australia was discovered. There are plenty of court records availabe which show how people were ‘exported’ for relatively minor crimes like stealing.
as most African slave traders did not venture past ports in Africia and purchased slaves, captured by mostly north africian gangs, then transported those slaves to the ‘new world’ at great expense. This made the Africian slavs a more expensive ‘commodity’ than the Irish white legs who had been transported there free of charge by British government policy. The less valuable ‘commodity’ is always treated with less care and more abuse than its more expensive counterpart. .
This article is qay more offensive than Meryl Streeps t shirt could ever be.. It attempts to use the vagueness of English language and hypocrisy of English laws to differentiate between both enslaved people of Ireland and Africa. When any human beings free will is forcefully removed by whatever means then they have been enslaved.. fancy convoluted words cannot mask that fact!
Slavers often raped slaves and if there were children as a result those children bore the slavers name. There were certainly slaver families with Irish names. The source of Irish names, if it is from the period of slavery, indicate some sort of connection with Ireland but not one we can safely be proud of.
The mistake made is the basic one of nationalism. Ireland in that period was no more populated by a single class than it is today. Just as now there was a wealthy elite and there were people with nothing. Some of the elite were slavers and plantation owners. Some were people who were transported as indentured servants.
So basically if you’re taken against your will, you’re “unfree”, not a slave, and if you do not want to cover up this part of Irish history… you’re a racist.
Also, because these slave traders had racist laws in favour of white Irish slaves…. apparently that’s
something which doesn’t make them slaves?
Pathetic attempt at being an iconoclastic “myth” buster. Kevin Myers would be proud.
According to Liam Hogan’s twitter account he’s whinging along with “Niamh Purseil” that we’re all racist for questioning his “facts”. Boo hoo.
A right of reply from an actual historian might be appropriate by the journal.ie
So let’s get this right: According to Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney, and Matthew Connor Reilly, If you were shipped to another country against your will, and forced to work against your will, and you never saw freedom again, and you were white – you were not a slave!? Hmmm…
It is all very simply for you racists. ( I can say you are racist, bcz you’re white)
1. If you’re white you are racist (nevermind whites ended slavery, blacks and jews actually wanted to keep it going. Blacks enslaved other blacks in Africa, Arabs took over 100 million African slaves and Jews ran much of the transatlantic slave trade)
2. Only whites are evil and cannot possibly ever have been slaves (including the 1 million Europeans taken by Arabs as slaves and usually raped)
So to summarise – whites = evil, evil, racist, nazis and bigots. And not the most compassionate race on the planet.
We know this cause Hollywood and the TV says so.
John Creen you said Grenada is an amazing place, 100% black population.
You’d never say any country that was 100% white was….an amazing place. You’re such a patronising ar$e-licking gimp for anything non-white
I put up a comment yesterday criticising the accuracy of this piece and asking that the journal contact other historians in this area as a right of reply. It received about a 100 likes.
It’s been taken down.
For all it’s talk of free speech and rights….
The journal’s a joke.
Grenada was a French colony until 1763. You cut sugarcane, you don’t pick it. There were no “Irish slaves” sent from Galway. The Irish owned plantations and slaves in Grenada. If you check the UCL slave-ownership database you will find the following names claiming compensation in Grenada (1834) Boyle, Burke, Cleary, Cuming, Dalton, Doherty, Dunn, Flynn, McDermott, McDonnell, McGowan, Sullivan, Walsh.
it’s still there and over 200 likes now
You do not make sense
@Liam Hogan:
OK, Hogan,
that’s 13 Irish named slave owners!
They don’t define the 5,000,000 Irish who were starved to death in Ireland, between 1845-1850:
Is Britain’s cover-up of its 1845-1850 Holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?
The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide. Consider: why did former Irish President Mary Robinson call it “Ireland’s greatest natural disaster” while she concealed the British army’s role? Potato blight, “phytophthora infestans”, did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn’t cause famine anywhere.
Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.
Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment). The attached map shows the never-before-published names and locations in Ireland of the food removal regiments (Disposition of the Army; Public Record Office, London; et al, of which we possess photocopies). Thus, Britain seized from Ireland’s producers tens of millions of head of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry & dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons.
The Public Record Office recently informed us that their British regiments’ Daily Activity Reports of 1845-1850 have “gone missing.” Those records include each regiment’s cattle drives and grain-cart convoys it escorted at gun-point from the Irish districts assigned to it. Also “missing” are the receipts issued by the British army commissariat officers in every Irish port tallying the cattle and tonnage of foodstuff removed; likewise the export lading manifests. Other records provide all-revealing glimpses of the “missing” data; such as: …
From Cork harbor on one day in 1847 2 the AJAX steamed for England with 1,514 firkins of butter, 102 casks of pork, 44 hogsheads of whiskey, 844 sacks of oats, 247 sacks of wheat, 106 bales of bacon, 13 casks of hams, 145 casks of porter, 12 sacks of fodder, 28 bales of feathers, 8 sacks of lard, 296 boxes of eggs, 30 head of cattle, 90 pigs, 220 lambs, 34 calves and 69 miscellaneous packages. On November 14, 1848 3, sailed, from Cork harbor alone: 147 bales of bacon, 120 casks and 135 barrels of pork, 5 casks of hams, 149 casks of miscellaneous provisions (foodstuff); 1,996 sacks & 950 barrels of oats; 300 bags of flour; 300 head of cattle; 239 sheep; 9,398 firkins of butter; 542 boxes of eggs. On July 28, 1848 4; a typical day’s food shipments from only the following four ports: from Limerick: the ANN, JOHN GUISE and MESSENGER for London; the PELTON CLINTON for Liverpool; and the CITY OF LIMERICK, BRITISH QUEEN, and CAMBRIAN MAID for Glasgow. This one-day removal of Limerick’s food was of 863 firkins of butter; 212 firkins, 1,198 casks and 200 kegs of lard, 87 casks of ham; 267 bales of bacon; 52 barrels of pork; 45 tons and 628 barrels of flour; 4,975 barrels of oats and 1,000 barrels of barley. From Kilrush: the ELLEN for Bristol; the CHARLES G. FRYER and MARY ELLIOTT for London. This one-day removal was of 550 tons of County Clare’s oats and 15 tons of its barley. From Tralee: the JOHN ST. BARBE, CLAUDIA and QUEEN for London; the SPOKESMAN for Liverpool. This one-day removal was of 711 tons of Kerry’s oats and 118 tons of its barley. From Galway: the MARY, VICTORIA, and DILIGENCE for London; the SWAN and UNION for Limerick (probably for trans-shipment to England). This one-day removal was of 60 sacks of Co. Galway’s flour; 30 sacks and 292 tons of its oatmeal; 294 tons of its oats; and 140 tons of its miscellaneous provisions (foodstuffs). British soldiers forcibly removed it from its starving Limerick, Clare, Kerry and Galway producers.
In Belmullet, Co. Mayo the mission of 151 soldiers 5 of the 49th Regiment, in addition to escorting livestock and crops to the port for export, was to guard a few tons of stored meal from the hands of the starving; its population falling from 237 to 105 between 1841 and 1851. Belmullet also lost its source of fish in January, 1849, when Britain’s Coast Guard arrested its fleet of enterprising fishermen ten miles at sea in the act of off-loading flour from a passing ship. They were sentenced to prison and their currachs were confiscated.
The Waterford Harbor British army commissariat officer wrote to British Treasury Chief Charles Trevelyan on April 24, 1846;
“The barges leave Clonmel once a week for this place, with the export supplies under convoy which, last Tuesday, consisted of 2 guns, 50 cavalry, and 80 infantry escorting them on the banks of the Suir as far as Carrick.”
While its people starved, the Clonmel district exported annually, along with its other farm produce, approximately 60,000 pigs in the form of cured pork. …
I’m not quite sure what the purpose of the article is . If anything it makes a great case for what has been termed white slavery .
It’s a fine case of propagating the White Man’s Guilt complex. As another person said; “same job, different job title”. Basically, both peoples were treated appalling and it’s essentially a pissing competition over who had it worse..
Two mistakes there old man, firstly the Irish Slave trade owners were the English Ascendency living in Ireland and thirdly an ‘Indentured servant’ is in fact a slave…..so deck off….why not just say your anti- the confederate flag…..
When you look at the names of the Irish slavers many are not ascendancy family names.
Slavery is hardly just white vs black. Asians had slaves, Africans had slaves
I actually thought that I was going to read this article and discover that Irish people were not in fact slaves in the Caribbean. What a load of absolute tripe! White liberal guilt alive and well…
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a ….., if it was sold like a slave, treated like a slave, it’s a .,… Article written by 3 supposedly professionals in their field clutching at straws..
But the Irish in the Caribbean didn’t walk like a duck or talk like a duck’ in comparison with the black chattel slaves. They weren’t enslaved for life, their children and their grandchildren were not born into slavery, they could not be murdered with ease or tortured as punishment.
So only being enslaved for most of their lives means they weren’t slaves? Ever? African slaves were freed on occasion too. Does that mean those individuals were never slaves either? The logic of your statement appears to be lacking.
What is the point in these 3 writers coming together to pen this article ? I mean, look at the little summary of each of their backgrounds at the bottom of the page. Not one of them comes from any sort of academic background which would allow them to speak with authority on the subject. A librarian and 2 archaeologists ? Next week, the journal.ie are letting me take a crack at finally nailing cold fusion
“Arguably the closest point between white servitude and black slavery”
Even without parsing this particular article, are we pretending that Barbary pirates from Africa didn’t abduct people from European shores? That’s just one example. The Romans, Vikings, Mongols and plenty of others had Caucasian slaves.
This is a pathetic, long-winded form of the “black people cant be racist and women any be sexist” line of thinking
this is a period in history the powers that be would rather we forget…………………its getting in the way of the emotional blackmail they are trying to use on us re immigrants.
I’m sorry but I disagree with this article. From readings and even a very interesting documentary I heard on Rte 1 it’s clear the Irish were slaves. Firstly slave gangs literally kidnapped a whole village in the north of Ireland leaving only the elderly. These villagers were stripped naked and sold. Families sold off separately. Children never seeing their parents again. White women were sold for ” comfort”. While it’s true that many white slaves did not work in the fields it was because of their fair skin and they just didn’t do so well. Most were house slaves. Women who gave birth gave birth to slave children so even if they could get theur own freedom they wouldn’t leave their children behind. There are also reports of plantation owners breeding black slaves with white Irish slaves in order to produce lighter skinned slaves that were in demand. This was opposed by slavers who wanted to sell their dark skinned African slaves So it was eventually stopped. There were wealthy Irish in the carribean but they didn’t much care about the Irish slaves as they were the lowest rung on the ladder in society anyway.
More pathetic white self hatred.
“Oh sure, you guys were taken against your will from your homes and families, brought to foreign countries, separated from any unfortunate family members who were captured with you, and forced to work for free by people who considered themselves your owners.
The same thing happened to us, but we were treated *way* worse than you guys, so obviously your experience isn’t all that relevant and you don’t deserve to be upset about it nor to bring it up in modern discussions about slavery and its ripple effect into current generations. The law was on your side at the time, so you’ve got no grounds for complaint. Also some Irish people may have had direct involvement in the slave trade (including of Irish slaves), so that pretty much wipes out any arguments you might have about being treated poorly.”
What a waste of words
So Rihanna is part Irish then!!
No, she uses an umbrella. The Irish attitude to weather is one of hope over experience, so any preparation for rain is frowned upon..
I understand that during the period it was illegal to own a white slave. So white slaves were generally referred to as “indentured servants” for bookkeeping purposes. To say that they were not slaves is insulting to what they had to endure.
And by recognising White Slavery, does it in no way , or did it ever, detract from the plight of the “Black Slaves”.
As others have pointed out, most were indentured to the point that they could never be free. The work they carried out for which they were paid (on paper only), covered the cost of their food and board, meaning they never actually received any coin into their hands.
The fact there was a big bad Irish White overseer means nothing in this context as there were many black slave traders and black overseers.
The author(s) would have us believe that “sure, these white Irish people just applied for the Jobsbridge of their time. Nothing to see here folks!”
You can be a slave, oh sorry “servant”, without being whipped and beaten.
I think the authors are doing some language gymnastics to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. If it looks like a duck……………
Bit of revisionism of a Tuesday
A spade is a spade.
You don’t have to look that far back in our history or to the Caribbean to find irish slavery. When did the last magdalen laundry or mother and baby homes close (1996or so)..but we’ll keep that one on QT..
Ahhh Global Research, that reputable source of all truth and virtue on the internet…..
It never ceases to amaze me how many people fall for the junk pushed out by the likes of Global Research, Alex Jones and their ilk, which is designed to prey on peoples’ gullibility.
Whilst there’s often a kernel of truth at the heart of their stories its generally exaggerated, distorted and sensationalised to the point that its totally meaningless.
This is nothing to do with liberal white guilt. It’s about confronting one of the methods used to shut down black claims of systematic inequality in the US going back to the time of slavery by saying, “the Irish were slaves too, we got over it, you should too.”
But are these authors not trying to do the same thing? By saying the Irish weren’t “slaves” they were technically “indentured servants” is that not trying to shut down the argument that other cultures have also experienced slavery and minimise what happened?
I agree with you that telling people to get over their history of slavery is a pathetic excuse for an argument, but it seems to me that these authors are trying a similar tack.
I don’t feel they are trying to minimise the situation or that indentured servitude is intended to be a euphemism. To me it’s about clarifying a historical situation that is entirely misrepresented in a modern political conflict in the US. I don’t see any desire to denigrate the Irish experience on the authors’ behalf.
They’re calling the idea of Irish slaves a myth because of a technicality in legal language in one particular country, that’s pretty clear diminishing to me.
The way I see it, the fate of Irish slaves/indentured servants in the Caribbean in the 17th and 18th centuries is irrelevant to the modern civil rights situation in America. It is spuriously introduced to the argument to downplay the institutionalised racism that is a direct legacy of black slavery in the US. I think this article is a useful contribution in this context, which I understand to be the intention behind it.
I agree you wholeheartedly that the experiences of chattel slaves and the huge legacy of what happened in America cannot be compared to other forms of slavery, nor dismissed because other forms of slavery exist/existed.
But I disagree that basing arguments on semantic differences adds anything other than pointless technicalities to the discussion. Calling Irish slavery a myth because other people had it worse is just as bad.
And yes, a history of Irish slavery it largely irrelevant in America I agree, but this article was posted to an Irish audience and invited them into discussion. Without the context and nuance of American politics here, you can see why commenters are taken aback.
I’m definitely more liberal than conservative when it comes to these types of topics but this is just populist liberal popular rabble rousing. Did generations of Europeans not get taken as slaves in centuries past? Taking up the cause of a persecuted group is obviously noble but don’t attempt to achieve it by belittling the woes of another. A good point was missed by this author.
The north siders from Dublin were treated like the blacks of Ireland
Mr Planter may I go now, my seven years service are up. Please check my contract
Why certainly Ms Riordan, Indeed it is! well done on surviving several years of back breaking work. Which killed off your menfolk
Thank you Mr Planter, what about my daughter by Toby-
Oh she is still my property-Toby is my slave
Ok
So what do I do now.
Well having learnt English and literacy, despite working from sun up till sundown. You can now pursue a career in a brothel by the docks. Farm a bit of swamp-or keep working for me
Okay Mr planter I will keep working for you.
Good girl, but keep your certificate of freedom. The courts have to know I freed you
For what it’s worth. My grandmother told us stories that had been passed down the generations to her since the mid 1600s about family that had been taken as slaves to the Caribbean. I’m going back nearly 50 years since I first heard it. A Cork/Limerick family.
I’m sure it might be argued that there was some degree of choice, but that is certainly not the story we grew up on, which included tales of young men been branded.
I did look into this some years ago and if you look at correspondence from the time, island governors back to the admiralty, you might find references to the fact that the Irish kept escaping to America and that there was a need for more slave labour. Particularly one that couldn’t disappear so easily.
Yes there was, and they often lived in conditions worse than those from Africa. Some really good short docu on YouTube showing the Redlegs. It’s weird as some still have a very Irish lilt.
Good old British colonialism. ….It has a lot to answer for
If you check the phone book of the Caribbean island of Monserrat you’ll see its full of Barrys, O’Sullivans, Keohanes and all the major Cork surnames. Imagine my surprise when I asked a local on a visit to the island, if he spoke English and got the reply in a pure Cork accent, ‘Of course I do, boi!’
We need to stop this slavery thing no matter where your from we all treated badly by someone at sometime in history, like today so many of us are controlled by a few. It was always a few who treated us all badly.
Black people feel it most and white feel sorry for them cause they were the most recent in history of slavery.
Take a look at most Irish families, I have aunt that was sent off in the 60s what happen to her and the other women there is just bad as slavery. But she doesn’t go blaming white people she blames the organization.
We must not hold anger we must leave but not forgotten and learn to go forward together.
using fancy language does not mean that the Irish were not slaves.
There had been a prevailing myth for sometime now that African-Americans with Irish surnames are descendants of Irish ‘slave masters.’ This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is compelling evidence to suggest that mixed African Irish slaves migrated on mass to the southern states of America towards the end of the 17th century from the Caribbean.
And let’s not forget the slaves sent from Ireland to Australia. From a global perspective, the slave trade was a class conflict not a race conflict.
Did I sense an agenda…?
I think some people missed the point. Indentured servitude was voluntary and for a limilted tim, I dont think african slaves had either luxury. Indentured servitude was a labor system whereby people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a certain number of years. It was widely employed in the 18th century in the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. Slavery, bondage, servitude refer to involuntary subjection to another or others.Slavery emphasizes the idea of complete ownership and control by a master: to be sold intoslavery. Bondage indicates a state of subjugation or captivity often involving burdensome and degrading labor: in bondage to a cruel master
One of the ways plantation owners got around the limited time indenture was to charge ‘room and board’ at a cost higher than the indentured persons weekly/monthly worth meaning they could never pay their way to freedom and so remained indentured for the rest of their lives….in other words….slaves.
This permanent indenture system was also used by unscrupulous wealthy land owners around the British colonies, including cases in Australia to keep those transported from leaving the big estates or ever getting paid.
Excellent and true comment Al Ca.
in the 17th century thousands of Irish people were forcibly transported to the West Indies. They did not go of their own free will. They were treated as unpaid labour there. Many spoke only the Irish language and had no idea that they had any ‘legal’ status. In the 19th century it was transportation to Australia. It was used as a means of sending people who might be rebellious to the Crown far away from Ireland. This article is not comparing like with like.
An excellent article that attempts to educate the uneducated. Shinner types prefer to wallow in their own ignorance.
Yawn…zzzzzzz. 5 years now Pat same comments daily. Have you no new material?
Sorry about that Chief.
Indentured servitude was the closest the Irish got to being enslaved in the Western Hemisphere, yet as argued, it is NOT slavery, nor was it anywhere near the scale or barbarity of the African slave trade. It is an important to distinguish between them today…why?
Because whenever situations arise in the U.S where racial issues become high, like Ferguson for example, the myth and use of the line that “the Irish were slaves, and they did just fine”, infers that the Black population in the U.S today only have themselves to blame for their position in society, for if the Irish can make it, then anyone can.
This argument overlooks the institutional racism that is alive and well in the U.S today and assumes that we live in a post-racial society where differences like skin colour don’t matter anymore. The thing is, the Irish were never slaves like the Blacks, and differences like skin colour do still matter today. It is a straw man argument based on the myth as the authors have shown.
Great article.
It is a straw man argument, based on a myth.
If people are going to be this pedantic about the meaning of the word, then technically no one but the Slavs are entitled to use the word ‘slave’ since it originates in their history of slavery.
It’s not pedantic, there is a big difference as mentioned in the article. Slavery was hereditary and a slave was denied personhood. Indentured servitude on the other hand was finite and the person was granted legal rights.
Jam Goldie, if people are SOLD it is slavery, nothing else. The Irish were SOLD to plantations. Myth me townhalls.
My understanding of slavery is that it involves forced servitude and being treated as property/a commodity.
I don’t see how limited legal rights and a finite contract (that by the author’s admission many people didn’t live to see) makes someone any less a slave if they have been kidnapped, sold, and forced to obey a master.
They are just different types of slavery, neither should diminish the other.
Again, there is a big difference between indentured servitude and slavery.
There’s a difference between indentured servitude and chattel slavery.
Both are types of slavery.
@jam like theres a big difference between performance related award scheme and Bonus.
Correct
It is Like most of the critical commentators did not read the article. Indentured servitude is not the same as slavery, for all the reasons the authors give.it is really indisputable.
it’s all good lads. we where privalaged white slaves. sorry I mean indentured servitude… why do keep i reading the journals exclusively progressive tripe. the point people are trying to make by referencing this history.is so black America can no longer blame this generation for their ancestors crimes. racism exists. but noting like the extent the media would like you to believe.
I agree with this article. Read a great book by Matthew Parker called “The Sugar Barons”. It is a history of the Caribbean sugar trade and the treatment of both slaves and indentured servants. It’s a riveting narrative and the author clearly explains the difference between slaves and indentured servants. A top quality read for those interested.
#Claims #ReadSomeBooks #RhiannaIsTheBestEvidence #TrustMe #Historians
The best part of this is the fact that anyone thinks that they have the right to feel personally victimised by something that has fcuk all to do with them,and happened generations before them!
Firstly, indentured servitude is not slavery. You can repeat yourself A thousand times, but you are still wrong.
Secondly, you are aware that you are playing into the hands of the most racist people in America and their Irish fellow travelers?
Thirdly, none of this takes away from the horrible oppression in 17th century Ireland, which was basically ethnic cleansing on an almost genocidal scale, combined with prejudice and religious persecution, and mass expulsion and indentured servitude.
Fourthly, as bad as that was,The Atlantic slave trade was many times worse.
Fifth, as a white Irish person you could transition into being a white north American. Descendants of African slaves to this day can never do that. The racism in America is incredibly old and deep rooted. Please do not allow certain Dubious Irish characters to bring this racism into Ireland, where it has no place.as the most oppressed of white people, it would be horrible if we allow racism to infect Ireland.
Finally, to repeat myself, do not let your sympathy for the oppression of the Irish be co-opted by southern American white racists, and their Irish fellow travelers, of whom there seems to be more all the time.
Thank you, and may your God go with you.
With all due respect, the Irish are not “the most opressed white people”. There were serfs in a lot of Europe up to 1860s, not to mention the slave markets in Istanbul. Rasist attitudes shouldn’t be fought by ignoring the historical facts.
Wow I am not impressed by your comment. It seems petty. I was not doing mathematics. This was obviously not my main point. I should have said, amongst the most Oppressed white people.. Since you refer to the 1860s, you must be aware that from 1845 to 1910, the population of Ireland decreased from 8 milliontwo 4 million, amongst the worst demographic disasters in modern European peace time.
Thank you.
Eminent historian like John Prendergast’s, ‘The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland’ Sean OCallaghan’s “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland”. The likes of John O’Shea’s book Murder Mutiny and Mayhem covers a later Jacobite period when Irish where used as indentured slaves. and seems to get the the entire 17th century confused.
Cromwell gets blamed for a lot of things where Ireland is concerned…..
Chris, Get the boat!
Article sort of gets there, but this is a complicated subject, not least because our understanding of things like “race” are not the same as they were then. We are talking about two different things when we talk about slavery based on colour, or slavery based on circumstances such as war. When we talk about black slavery that is a phenomena in itself and something that was developed in the Caribean in the 17 th century. To understand this it is necessary to realize that slavery based on the colour of your skin was a new idea that came out of the unique circumstances in the Caribbean at the time. Before this no one had thought to base servitude on such an arbitrary thing. You could be a slave for any reason, mostly through capture in war or for criminal reasons, but your skin colour did not matter. Slavery was equal opportunities to put it in modern parlance.
Now, in the 17th century the small number of settlers found themselves on islands with increasing numbers of “servants”, workers etc as the sugar industry began to take off. Initially this was a dumping ground for Irish “rebels” and criminals sent as labour. Africans were few at first and no law based on colour existed so some who survived indenture became free and in rare cases even owned slaves themselves. However, the numbers of African and Irish transporters increased enormously under the Cromwellian republican regime and by 1660 s the settlers were in a panic, they were afraid of the increasing fraternization between their Irish and African servants/slaves so they looked for ways to keep them separate. The Irish were particularly threatening as they had military experience and a long history of resistance to the English settlers and, were they to combine with the numerically superior Africans the colonies could be eliminated.
Hence the response was the first explicit laws created in 1661 on Barbados declaring chattel slavery to be based on skin colour, and the other type of servants were to remain as indentured. Many of mixed origin now became chattel slaves by default. These laws spread throughout the Caribbean and into the southern United States creating the slavery based on colour and hence modern racism that we are so familiar with today. The Gaelic Irish were indeed forcibly transported and used as slave labour in the Caribbean, but the first generation immigrants escaped the colour laws, however their mixed descendants were not so lucky. Later Irish immigrants could be more socially mobile thanks to their skin colour. It is however ludicrous to use the Irish experience to negate the African one. Their experiences started out similar but diverged over time as the laws made to seperate them worked their magic as they continue to do to this day. people forget is that how it is now is not how if was then, many in the USA who think they are Irish are in fact descended from Scots or English settlers who were part of the suppression of native Irish and enslavement of Africans. And also populations are far more mixed than we now imagine.
You write well Dilean and raise very good points that clarify the situation on a confusing period of history.
Liam Hogan’s obsession with equating the concept of slavery explicity with the phenomenon of chattel slavery is so bizarre that he has argued Jewish victims of the Holocaust, branded subhuman and pressed into labour for the war economy were not actually slaves, but merely “forced labourers”
a gang of travellers kept homeless men in shabby conditions but fed them and provided them with food and work. they were jailed rightly for slavery! just because they were treated differently than others or some other Irish participated in the use of slaves the fact still remains the same!
Guys, in my primary school days I can remember a story studied of men who came ashore in rowboats, oars muffled by sacks, to a village in Cork who ransacked the place and took the residents “into slavery”. Can anyone else remember this? Does anyone know the event I’m referring to? Or the book that it came from?
After a bit of digging, I came up with the Sack of Baltimore. This was the event I was referring to. Barbary piracy predates the events in the article above. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Baltimore
So erm.. what about the people conscripted into Prussian service, after 1798. Then sent to the salt mines?
Yes indentured service on paper is not slavery. A lot of people used it to make a start in the new world. Yes Montserrat was peopled by Irish tobacco farmers. For a while the Irish of Montserrat rose in rebellion and were free. Is it totally beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that the Irish sold into servitude as Cromwellian prisoners had a particularly bad time of it
Also per Wikipedia Rhianna has Irish blood
http://www.joe.ie/life-style/rihanna-is-irish-really/8680
Indentured servitude occurred later and was preceded by large scale enslavement of the Irish in the 16th and early 17th century. Hundreds of thousands of Irish were actually sold into slavery as chattels, stop kidding yourselves.
Read……. To Hell or Barbados by Sean O’Callaghan…..The ethnic cleansing of Ireland…..good read. …
If anybody wants to read the real truth on how badly the Irish slaves were treated, try reading this book
To Hell or Barbados – Sean O’Callaghan
Just a note for the author, White Irish were force bred with black Africans. That is where the original word ‘Mulatto’ comes from. An indentured servant was a slave but normally had a deadline of several when they would become free. However, the tobacco/sugar planters didn’t not want to give them their freedom and they promised small patch of land so most were beaten or starved to death as they reached the end of their indenture.
Virginal Tobacco, when it was first created had white slave Irish working alongside the blacks. The Virginia museum has hundreds of copies of old warrants for runaway Irish slaves, offering reward for their capture.
A Quaker from Waterford named John Perrot dedicated his entire life attempting and buying thousands of Irish slaves freedom. A true Saint of the Irish. When he approached the Vatican for help, they fearing this new religion had him and his friend locked in a mad house until the intervention of King Charles. Instead of turning bitter he immediately returned to his life of trying to end Irish slavery. He died and is buried in a papist grave in Barbados.
This man did more to ease the horrific suffering of the Irish that we will ever know. RIP
Denying history to absolve yourself of the shame of defeat, ethnic cleansing and slavery does not do us, nor our ancestors, any service. Easy for glib historians to revise history with selected sources, but make no mistake, the Irish were treated like cattle, the only difference was that they could assimilate more easily if clever, in a way an African could not. Shoddy research, even worse assertion that somehow the experience was somehow less traumatic than the “other” experience.
An Irish politcal prisoner who arrive in Bababos and 1650 had not rights whatsoever. Also, many were isolated on isolated plantations where the laws of the land were probably not well known to the field work. Not every white person who ended up in Barbadoes had an endentured servant contract, or protection from the Anglocentric government. To this this way is ignorant. Where is the reference to the document that states that Irish “troublemakers” had any rights in Barbados. Many of the Irish, for some period of time, no matter the laws of the apologists, were defacto slaves. They could be beaten, raped and murdered without little of no recourse. Who would document thier rape, murder, and abuse? Not the English plantation owners,who were often the culprets. If the Irish were the sadisitic overseers this “historians” claim, they were still working for the man on Barbados: The English. To drag another island, with different laws, into this argument is not convincing. Some of the Irish were pretty much slaves, though because of the color of their skin, rape and intermarriage, they were able to morph into citizens with more standing, unlike the blacks. What is so fantastic is the shrill voices of those who claim the Irish were not slaves. Yes, they were, at least for a period of time on Barbados.
We Irish captured a British slave once upon a time.
He wasn’t much good at anything apart from throwing snakes into the sea and picking shamrocks.
A good mountain climber too.
We get a day off every 17th March because of him so at least he was some use to us.
To Hell or Barbados was debunked by a certain Liam Hogan. Check it out.
Do people honestly not know that the Irish made many a raid on English shores an capture slave’s to return to ireland for servitude …
Not on an industrial scale though ..
The book To Hell or Barbados was debunked by a certain Liam Hogan.
@Hamish McTaggart:
That would be Hogan the Informer! Nuff said!
Good day, Liam. This was definitely an interesting read and brings up a few valid points of contention, though as others have stated, the majority of those are around semantics. I have also noticed in your responses to comments that you often just state that something IS refuted, without actually giving sources or logic that shows that (to be fair, some of the comments have not done their fair share of specifically mentioning reliable authors/facts).
On that note, would you mind refuting, in detail the efforts and sources referenced in the following article: https://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT
Thank you,
Eric
Indenture Collins English Dictionary definition below. There is a distinction and difference in the means of exploitation of the Irish and African “slaves”. Indentured or owned.
noun
1. any deed, contract, or sealed agreement between two or more parties
2. (formerly) a deed drawn up in duplicate, each part having correspondingly indented edges for identification and security
3. (often plural) a contract between an apprentice and his master
4. a formal or official list or certificate authenticated for use as a voucher, etc
5. a less common word for indentation
verb
6. (intransitive) to enter into an agreement by indenture
7. (transitive) to bind (an apprentice, servant, etc) by indenture
8. (transitive) obsolete to indent or wrinkle
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