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. Some of these posts are asking for PROOF of this abomination, all you have to do is goodle “REDLEGS OF BARBADOS” – there is all the proof you need. They are white, they are poor, they are in Barbados and have been for over 350 years. Now, how did that happen? Get real people it happened, end of story.

  2. I did not know such a thing happened to us, I will ask why we are not taught these facts in school. I will write to my T.D as ask what can he do to erect a marmoreal to the murdered people of Trim County Meath. The English became very powerful on the backs of millions of people, did you know that the current Royal family own all the tobacco production in the US (Philip Morris) has the coat of arms of the British crown. We the Irish are still paying millions of euros to the British crown in rents, for lands, shops, most of Grafton st is owned by the Crown, My dad just bought out the ground rents of our farm in 1985 he was paying ground rents to a Lord Folwer. If you ask me I think the Irish are enslaved again with over priced mortgages and an national debt of 250 billion which we will never repay.

    As for the jews and their troubles, all that was planned just to get the UK to give up Israel and hand it back over to the jewish people to have as a home land. The 5million jews that were killed were working class from Poland and a few wealthy ones from France,
    Belgium and Holland. If you look into it you can find the truth. A very famous American once said to have 1 cow in Israel is worth all the jews in Poland.

    So not is all that is seems, Pope Adrian IV asked King Henry to conquer Ireland as Ireland was a well known centre of teaching and learning with well educated scholars
    and the Vatican wanted to be the centre of the religious world therefore Ireland had to be ruled and not be aloud to flourish. This later led to the selling of Irish people as slaves as England tried to take Ireland for its self and use Ireland as a food basket to feed its own people.
    This is fact and is documented in Vatican papers.

    So if anyone reads my blog and wants to find out how to beat the system, dont smoke dont use atm cards, credit cards, use only cash ,dont use a bank, do build a straw house see books on amazon straw house construction, do buy a wind turbine and solar collectors, cycle a bike, avoid paying tax rather than tax evasion. grow your own food.

  3. What my heritage is shouldn’t be important here, but I think it is… I am of Scottish and Irish descent, so I am not writing from any particular perspective. I could get sucked into this ‘whose worse off’ campaign, but I refuse. Instead, I want to say that I think this article by John Martin is triggering a massive, sordid response primarily because of the inflammatory attitude he writes this with – angry, even resentful. And it hints of poor research, since some of his information is incorrect, taken out of context, and/ or exaggerated. It is not a scholarly piece of research, but is based on general information that has been ignored, because the Irish have been badly persecuted, and continue to be ostracized by, don’t forget, WHITE folks. And I’m sure somewhere down the line the Irish did the same to some other group. Regardless of the numbers impacted, or the harshness of treatment by slave-holders, it is all about degradation. Some have been hit harder than others, and to this day, genocide and slavery continues. But it’s all the same, and nearly all cultures have done it and been victim to it. John’s rage is obvious, but comes across as a “poor us”, “we had it just as bad” attitude that is frankly annoying. OK. So the Irish were slaves… Now we know. But it is of no surprise to me, and it doesn’t make the enslavement of any other group more benign. Enough said…

    1. there is no doubt that irish people are screwing innocent people over as we speak, but, i;ve never seen ireland enslave britain on a mass scale. irish and british may be both involved with savage acts, but i assure you that the british are more savage. the sun never set in the british empire because no one would trust the british during the daylight. when the british arrived in India, India was the richest country in the world. when the brits left, India was the poorest. i’ve never seen Africans broker white people in wholesale amounts. never seen native americans who dominate majority populations in many latin american countries try to enslave the parasitical white minority. people are not the same. some groups are worse than others. namely british, and jews. you can also see british nastiness rub off on their pupet regimes across the world

  4. I have come very late to this topic but for any one wanting to read a book on this subject see The Black Irish by Auberey Gwynn (1929) but it has to be said this was very much a poineering effort and much material has been added since.
    H.Bourne

  5. I wish we learned about this in school,so the back people would have less reason to bitch and moan!

  6. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Happened, but was overexaggerated in the amounts of slaves bought to the Americas.

    There were already black people in the Americas before slavery. They Lied about the amounts of slave ships, & there is no way that they could transport 100 million slaves over the course of 300 years. Where is the proof of the massive slave ships?

    Most of the slaves were transported to the Caribbean,not the USA. The large majority of the black population in the USA are indigenous, they weren’t brought here on ships, they were here already.

    Also, if they shipped over 100 million slaves to the Americas, wouldn’t the black population in the USA be more than 12 percent? Think About it for a moment

    The reason why they had black slavery is because they finished exploiting the Natives, Then the Irish, so they replaced it with Black slavery & then they replaced the black slaves with East Indian Slaves, who were Disguised as Indentured servants, coerced into working on plantations.

    These East Indian Slaves were transported to Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Guyana, Trinidad, & Jamaica. Look up Coolies: When Britain Reinvented Slavery to see what i’m talking about.

    The whole thing about certain curses falling upon Negroes & Native Americans, & Hispanics is bullshit.

    What about the Filipinos, who were enslaved by the Spaniards for over 300 years, & forced to convert to Catholicism & change there names. Is that a curse for disobeying God?

    Have you ever heard of the Goa Inquisition, where the Portuguese Jesuit Missionaries would brutally torture & Murder Hindus for not converting to Catholicism, is that a curse for disobeying God?

    What about the rest of the world, which the majority are Third World Countries, & the children are starving, Is that a Curse for disobeying God?

    There are more slaves now than any other time in history. They just put the emphasis on black slavery to confuse the masses into thinking that only one group was exploited, when in fact they were exploiting everyone. It was a divide & conquer technique.

    Did you know that the movie Roots was a lie? Alex Haley never had an ancestor named Kunta Kinte. He was sued by the author he stole the story basis from.

    Black slavery has been over-emphasized in the Media so much, that we don’t even realize that the Natives were the first slaves, then the Irish, The Blacks, & the East Indians. They were/are still exploiting the nonwhites of the world.

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