The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves

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The Slaves That Time Forgot

By John Martin

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

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. Ireland’s 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. Britain’s 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. They’ll 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 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.

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 it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s 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 they’ve 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.

http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html


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541 thoughts on “The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves”

  1. I’m Irish,by my father and English Cherokee by my other, and some of my ancestors were slaves according to my grandfather, We have relatives in Barbados, another place where slaves were shipped. I started going out with a Rasta, and that’s when my grandfather told me about all this Irish history. When my guy shared with me about what being Rasta was all about, I made a commitment to the lifestyle. Thank you so much, for your website.

  2. Hey Supreme, dumb ass it’s a flying fuck! not a fly fucking. If you don’t care for the Irish why did you bother looking up this particular web page.

  3. Everyone, there is a documentary called “the blood of th Irish”. It was aired on RTE about 6 months ago. The Irish genes were decoded. Samples of Irish peoples genes was taken from thousands of men across the country. We are not genetically different from our European counterparts. We are not celtic in origin genetically, however the celtic culture is more preserved in Ireland and Scotland. We share almost exactly the same gene code as people from The Basque land in Spain. It is certain now the first people who entered the island came from there around 10,000 years ago. The gene decoded is from the group R1b and is almost 100% found in the west of Ireland and highly concentrated around the rest of the country. Most Europeans are decended from the second group of people who left Africa to the North before the last ice age and retreated to Spain and Italy (warmer climates) until the ice melted and then progressed forward to inhabit the last of Europe, ie Ireland.
    I’m writing this because I feel we have to be carefull about writing stuff like the Irish are different to other Europeans genetically. Unless you have studies and proof to back this, you are opening the flood gates for racists and bigots who might want to try and insinuate that Irish people are inferior people. We are all one family with some amazing variations in ours genes brought about by enviromental conditions familiar to our race and cultures.

  4. I was upset when I read “Irish Slave Traders” in the title, thinking we Irish were the criminals, thankfully it wasn’t us. The English “gentry” who organized our slavery in the 1600’s haven’t gone away, they had thirteen Irish people shot dead like dogs in occupied Ireland during the 1970’s just to protect their English version of Law and Order. They have made the ordinary decent English people perennially hated in Ireland and are currently getting the English hated in Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably in Iran too. I am always amazed at how the great warriors, the Scots, so timidly serve the English “gentry”.
    Many thanks to the Rastafarians, I never realized that we were sold as slaves. I strongly believe that Mediterranean Africans had a very big input into the Irish identity in ancient times. Much of our culture and artifacts support this view. Best wishes to all.

  5. Just to add…… Gulliver’s Travels and other entertaining satirical works were written in Dublin by the English clergyman Dean Swift around this time. These allegorical stories reveal his outrage at what was happening to the Irish, they couldn’t be supressed, so they were presented as fiction……

  6. There is also a very interesting History Documentary on YouTube, called MEET THE AFRIKAN, , it is done in 9 different parts each lasting about 10 minutes. It was so interesting I downloaded all of them and combined them for DVD. The video shows that we are all related through mitochondrial DNA

  7. before the african slave trade muslims took millions ov white christians as slaves in nort africa. soo white people are not the devil if any 1 it the muslims..

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