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% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Irelands population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britains solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. Theyll come up with terms like Indentured Servants to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
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 masters 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.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. 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.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then theyve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
I'm also Finnish, and the Russians and Swedes did not treat my people all that much differently. Karelia is still part of Russia - a good place to dump toxic waste.
I'm also Bohemian - the Slavs were not so nice to the ethic Germans amongst them that my great-grandparents stuck around. This cruelty to ethnic Germans was part of Hitler's justification for the annexation of The Sudetenland.
And it's funny - I don't really hold any animus toward English, Russian, Swede, or Slav persons today.
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.
I often hear that Black Americans have lighter skin than Africans because some of their ancestors are white, and those ancestors were white slave-owning men who raped their female slaves.
Could it actually be the case that some -- or most -- of this white ancestry is due to the above paragraph?
I believe you are right Rex. Sounds like the white slave owning men raping the africans is a cover story to gin up all the anger and resentment we keep seeing. The real story is just as heinous, but certainly places a different light on it.
Yes, and quite a bit of what you have been told as truth is outright fabrication.
Just ask yourself one question:
We are told that slaveowners viewed slaves as less than animals, that they prized their livestock higher than their slaves, that their dogs were treated and fed better.
If that were the case, and you were a distinguished gentleman landowner, would you ever have the desire to bring one to your bed?
If that were the case, and you were a distinguished gentleman landowner, would you ever have the desire to bring one to your bed?
I made that exact argument to a professor (female, but not a radical feminist) when in college, and the response was (as you might predict) that rape isn't about sexual desire, but about exercising power.
I don't know what rapists think exactly, but slavery necessitates an element of dehumanization, and rape might too. Muslims raping young white women is a way of exerting dominance over a foreign culture in the process of being conquered ("we rape your women, and you can do nothing about it, faggots"), and also an act of considering the female sub-human, and therefore subject of being defiled (children and women are the very groups every society should seek to protect the most).
So is it imaginable that slaves, which were considered cattle, were raped by some relatively rich men? [Btw, 40% of all slave owners were Jews, who were a tiny minority, and only 5% of all house holds owned any slaves in the US, they were quite expensive.] Yes, it's possible. But the same could be said that dehumanized people are not subject of being of rape either, given that it would be considered similar to sodomy. Also you'd create bastard offspring, which could lead to more trouble - it would still be your children, who'd live in slavery, and that might be an inacceptable idea to most people, especially to those who have considerations for maintaining some reputation - and slave owners were those who were rather wealthy.
Also consider that not all intercourse with slaves was automatically rape, even if the concept of consent would have to be stretched a lot.
I think it's plausible to assume that the biggest factor was indeed intentional white-black slave interbreeding. It would also explain the vast difference in average IQ between blacks in Africa and blacks in the US.
But why the hell do I read about this the first time? Wow...
right, I did a search and it's all snopes and others claiming they were "indentured servants" or trying to dismiss it. This has convinced me even more this is true.
Lol, they are covering up two hidden facts with that BS.
It was 'indentured servitude' to start with, and they are somewhat correct that indentured servitude was not the same thing as the slavery we so often refer to.
Indentured servitude could be entered willingly, and often was, as it was the only form of welfare around. Guaranteed job security with benefits.
It was also used as incarceration, putting a criminal in the charge of the person they had wronged. The very concept of "Paying your debt to society" was born from this practice.
It had a limit, a maximum of seven years before you were required to be freed. Modern statutes of limitations are born from these same laws.
They had rights, the same rights as any other person minus the right to quit their job.
The person who owned the contract (note the distinction) was required to feed and house the servant for the full seven years, AND their family. The reason people voluntarily entered into servitude.
Most depictions you are familiar with of "Servants" are of this exact system in practice. Some servants renegotiated their contract every seven years and willingly served for life.
The first major disruption of this system was the Slave Trade. Demand had outstripped willing servants, particularly in America where the pioneer spirit meant anyone could head west and make a life for themselves. This left the rich in need of a supply of healthy workers, which the British were all to happy to provide.
But then a BLACK democrat successfully sued to keep one of his slaves past the 7 year contract he was supposed to have freed him by. The end result of that had a DEMOCRAT judge declare that slaves (indentured servants at the time) were actually property, and that black slaves were subhuman and didn't have the same rights as other slaves. This changed virtually everything about indentured servitude and, technically, "Slavery" as we define it now was born at that moment.
This led to things getting much, MUCH worse, for a very short time period that led to the push for abolition becoming wide spread. A cornerstone of human civilization had been twisted into something much worse than it was supposed to be and people were more supportive of abolishing it than trying to fix it.
Three quarters of my ancestors came to America fleeing that.
And I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't recognize its Irish-language name. I only knew it in English; they even took the Irishmen's language from them.
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% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Irelands population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britains solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. Theyll come up with terms like Indentured Servants to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
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 masters 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.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. 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.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then theyve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
Wonderful post. Thanks for yr input.
This is from a forum post. Not sure if it’s the same person but I’ve seen this elsewhere. Still it’s very important to disseminate.
Being Irish, I knew this story.
I'm also Finnish, and the Russians and Swedes did not treat my people all that much differently. Karelia is still part of Russia - a good place to dump toxic waste.
I'm also Bohemian - the Slavs were not so nice to the ethic Germans amongst them that my great-grandparents stuck around. This cruelty to ethnic Germans was part of Hitler's justification for the annexation of The Sudetenland.
And it's funny - I don't really hold any animus toward English, Russian, Swede, or Slav persons today.
Redpill for most people. History is full of people enslaving and cleansing other ethnicities...
Yeeeeeuuuup, Humans are assholes 5o each other...
I often hear that Black Americans have lighter skin than Africans because some of their ancestors are white, and those ancestors were white slave-owning men who raped their female slaves.
Could it actually be the case that some -- or most -- of this white ancestry is due to the above paragraph?
I've read that ~3/4 of black people actually have white lineage. It's believable when you look at the skin of a black american vs. one from Africa.
Lock up the liquor before they kill us all!
It’s too late, one of every corner! Run I say! Run!
You can still see red haired, freckled black people in Jamaica and Barbados today.
I believe you are right Rex. Sounds like the white slave owning men raping the africans is a cover story to gin up all the anger and resentment we keep seeing. The real story is just as heinous, but certainly places a different light on it.
Yes, and quite a bit of what you have been told as truth is outright fabrication.
Just ask yourself one question:
We are told that slaveowners viewed slaves as less than animals, that they prized their livestock higher than their slaves, that their dogs were treated and fed better.
If that were the case, and you were a distinguished gentleman landowner, would you ever have the desire to bring one to your bed?
It can't be both.
Both are possible obviously. You act as though one person owned them all. Different owners might treat their slaves differently...
?m ml
I made that exact argument to a professor (female, but not a radical feminist) when in college, and the response was (as you might predict) that rape isn't about sexual desire, but about exercising power.
Didn't make sense to me then or now.
I don't know what rapists think exactly, but slavery necessitates an element of dehumanization, and rape might too. Muslims raping young white women is a way of exerting dominance over a foreign culture in the process of being conquered ("we rape your women, and you can do nothing about it, faggots"), and also an act of considering the female sub-human, and therefore subject of being defiled (children and women are the very groups every society should seek to protect the most).
So is it imaginable that slaves, which were considered cattle, were raped by some relatively rich men? [Btw, 40% of all slave owners were Jews, who were a tiny minority, and only 5% of all house holds owned any slaves in the US, they were quite expensive.] Yes, it's possible. But the same could be said that dehumanized people are not subject of being of rape either, given that it would be considered similar to sodomy. Also you'd create bastard offspring, which could lead to more trouble - it would still be your children, who'd live in slavery, and that might be an inacceptable idea to most people, especially to those who have considerations for maintaining some reputation - and slave owners were those who were rather wealthy.
Also consider that not all intercourse with slaves was automatically rape, even if the concept of consent would have to be stretched a lot.
I think it's plausible to assume that the biggest factor was indeed intentional white-black slave interbreeding. It would also explain the vast difference in average IQ between blacks in Africa and blacks in the US.
But why the hell do I read about this the first time? Wow...
Rape is an exercise of power over humans. People don't fuck their cattle, they whip them and prod them.
That's the point.
Jesus I'm turning 32 next month and never heard about this atrocity. My blood is boiling right now
I'm turning 57 next month and never heard of this. Damn! What the hell else do we not know?
right, I did a search and it's all snopes and others claiming they were "indentured servants" or trying to dismiss it. This has convinced me even more this is true.
Lol, they are covering up two hidden facts with that BS.
It was 'indentured servitude' to start with, and they are somewhat correct that indentured servitude was not the same thing as the slavery we so often refer to.
The first major disruption of this system was the Slave Trade. Demand had outstripped willing servants, particularly in America where the pioneer spirit meant anyone could head west and make a life for themselves. This left the rich in need of a supply of healthy workers, which the British were all to happy to provide.
But then a BLACK democrat successfully sued to keep one of his slaves past the 7 year contract he was supposed to have freed him by. The end result of that had a DEMOCRAT judge declare that slaves (indentured servants at the time) were actually property, and that black slaves were subhuman and didn't have the same rights as other slaves. This changed virtually everything about indentured servitude and, technically, "Slavery" as we define it now was born at that moment.
This led to things getting much, MUCH worse, for a very short time period that led to the push for abolition becoming wide spread. A cornerstone of human civilization had been twisted into something much worse than it was supposed to be and people were more supportive of abolishing it than trying to fix it.
Oh, wait til you read the history of the gorta mor.
Three quarters of my ancestors came to America fleeing that.
And I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't recognize its Irish-language name. I only knew it in English; they even took the Irishmen's language from them.