Irish slaves myth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth

Mural of Frederick Douglass, Falls Road, Belfast. Irish people's history has embraced both a legacy of identification with the oppressed, and in propagation of the Irish Slaves Myths, elements of racism.

 

The Irish slaves myth concerns the use of the term Irish "slaves" as a conflation of the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries. Some white nationalists, and others who want to minimize the hereditary chattel slavery experience of Africans and their descendants, have used the false equivalence myth to promote racism against African Americans^[1] or claim that African Americans are too vocal in seeking justice. The Irish slaves myth has also been invoked by some Irish activists, to highlight the British oppression of the Irish people and to suppress the history of Irish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

The myth has been in circulation since at least the 1990s and has been disseminated in online memes and social media debates. In 2016, academics and Irish historians wrote to condemn the myth.

Background

The idea that Irish people are slaves has a long history. According to historian Liam Kennedy, the idea was popular among the nineteenth-century Young Ireland movement. John Mitchel was particularly vocal in his claim that the Irish were enslaved, although he supported the transatlantic slave trade of Africans.

Some books have used the term "slaves" for captive Irish people forced from their homes in Ireland and shipped overseas, against their will, to the New World, particularly the British Colonies. The term "slaves" or "bond slaves" was used for a "time-bound" system of years that was not perpetual. The British legal term used was "indentured servants" whether the servants had volunteered for transport or were kidnapped and forced aboard ships. However, for centuries, Irish folklore or various books had referred to the captive servants as Irish "slaves" even into the 20th century.

During the 17th century, tens of thousands of British and Irish indentured servants immigrated to British America. The majority of these entered into indentured servitude in the Americas for a set number of years willingly in order to pay their way across the Atlantic, but at least 10,000 were transported as punishment for rebellion against English rule in Ireland or for other crimes, then subjected to forced labour for a given period.

During this same period, the Atlantic slave trade was enslaving millions of Africans and bringing them to the Americas, including the British colonies, where they were put to work. In Ireland, Africa, and in the Caribbean, Irish people benefited from the African trade, as slave merchants, factors, investors, and owners. According to historian Nini Rodgers, "every group in Ireland produced merchants who benefited from the slave trade and the expanding slave colonies." Unlike Irish indentured servants, enslaved Africans generally were made slaves for life and slave status was imposed on their children at birth. Both systematically and legally, Africans were subjected to a lifelong, heritable slavery that the Irish never were. African slaves' future descendants became property.

Origins and propagation

The myth is especially popular with apologists for the Confederate States of America, the secessionist slave states of the South during the American Civil War. According to research librarian and independent scholar Liam Hogan, the most influential book to assert the myth was They Were White And They Were Slaves: The Untold History of The Enslavement of Whites In Early America, self-published in the US in 1993 by conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II (who blamed Jews for the African slave trade).

This was followed in Ireland in 2000 by the book To Hell Or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by the journalist Sean O'Callaghan. The book continued Hoffman's themes and introduced the concept of Irish women being forcibly bred with African men in order to produce mulattos, who are represented as being more valuable than slaves of purely Irish ancestry. It is not made clear why this is the case, or why it was not possible to achieve the same result with the physical union of European men and African women, a far more frequent interracial union. Other authors repeated these lurid descriptions of Irish women being compelled to have sex with African men, which have no basis in the historical record. Liam Hogan and other historians have described the book as shoddily researched.

In the Dublin Review of Books, professor Bryan Fanning states: "The popularity of the 'Irish slaves' meme cannot simply be blamed on the online propaganda of white supremacist groups. There are several elements at play beyond the deliberate falsification of the past. Widespread acceptance online of a false equivalence between chattel slavery and the treatment of Irish migrants appears to be rooted in Irish narratives of victimhood that continue to be articulated within Ireland’s cultural and political mainstreams." Irish people's history has embraced both a legacy of identification with the oppressed, and elements of racism in the service of Irish nationalism, according to Fanning.

According to The New York Times: "In America, [O'Callaghan's] book connected the white slave narrative to an influential ethnic group of over 34 million people, many of whom had been raised on stories of Irish rebellion against Britain and tales of anti-Irish bias in America at the turn of the 20th century. From there, it took off." O'Callaghan's claims were repeated on Irish genealogy websites, the Canadian conspiracy theory website Globalresearch.ca, Niall O'Dowd's IrishCentral, Scientific American and The Daily Kos. The 2008 article on Globalresearch.ca has been a significant online source for the myth, having been shared almost a million times by March 2016. The myth has been spread on white nationalist message boards, neo-Nazi websites, the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, and has been shared millions of times on Facebook.

The myth has been a common trope on the white supremacist website Stormfront since 2003. It has circulated widely in the United States, and has recently begun to become common in Ireland after the "Irish slaves" meme went viral on social media in 2013. After the 2014 arrival of the Black Lives Matter movement, the myth was frequently referenced by right-wing white Americans attempting to undermine it and other African-American civil rights issues, according to Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International.

In August 2015, the meme was referred to in the context of debates about the continued flying of the Confederate flag, following the Charleston church shooting. In May 2016, it was referenced by prominent members of the Irish republican party Sinn Féin, after their leader Gerry Adams became involved in a controversy over his use of the word "nigger". Irish Times columnist Donald Clarke describes the meme as racist, saying "More commonly we see racists using the myth to belittle the suffering visited on black slaves and to siphon some sympathy towards their own clan." According to The New York Times, the myth is "often politically motivated" and has been used to create "racist barbs" against African-Americans.

Common elements

Common elements to memes that propagate the myth are:

• The conspiracy theory that historians and the media are covering up Irish slavery.
• That Irish people were enslaved after the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland in 1649.
• Irish slaves were treated worse than African slaves.
• Irish women were forced to reproduce with African men.
• Intending to diminish the discrimination that African-Americans have historically experienced, with memes like "The Irish were slaves, too. We got over it, so why can't you?".
• Using photographs of victims of the Holocaust or 20th century child laborers, claiming that they are Irish slaves.
• A reference to an alleged 1625 declaration by King James II to send thousands of Irish prisoners to the West Indies as slaves. James II had not been even born yet; he was born in 1633 and started his rule in 1685. 1625 saw the end of James I's rule and the rise of Charles I to the throne.
• The substitution of the victims of actual atrocities committed against African slaves with Irish victims. The far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, for instance, substituted the 132 African victims of the 1781 Zong massacre with Irish victims. Several online articles about "Irish slaves" have inflated the number 132 to 1,302. Historian Liam Hogan traces the first juxtaposition of the Zong massacre with Irish suffering to 2002, when James Mullin, chair of the New Jersey-based Irish Famine Curriculum Committee and Education Fund, wrote a lurid article blurring the lines between the history of African enslavement in the British Americas with the history of Irish colonial indentured servitude.

Academic criticism and responses

The Irish Examiner removed an article that cited John Martin's Globalresearch.ca piece from its website in early 2016 after 82 writers, historians and academics wrote an open letter condemning the myth. Scientific American published a blog post, which was also debunked in the open letter, and later heavily revised the blog to remove the incorrect historical material.

Writing in The New York Times, Liam Stack noted that inaccurate "Irish slavery" claims "also appeared on IrishCentral, a leading Irish-American news website." IrishCentral's publisher Niall O'Dowd then wrote an op-ed in which he states that "there is no way the Irish slave experience mirrored the extent or level of centuries-long degradation that African slaves went through." The op-ed then goes on to draw comparisons between indentured servitude and slavery. Liam Hogan, among others, criticized IrishCentral for being slow to remove the articles from its website, and for the ahistoric comparison in the editorial.

Sean O'Callaghan's book To Hell or Barbados in particular has been criticised by, among others, Dr Nini Rodgers, who stated that his narrative appeared to arise from his horror at seeing white people being on a level with blacks. Bryan Fanning notes the book ignored scholarly research.

Historian Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University, states that the current racial climate is leaning toward denial of certain events in history, saying "There is a strange war on memory that's going on right now, denying the facts of chattel slavery, or claiming to have learned on Facebook or social media that, say, Irish slavery was worse, that white people were enslaved as well. Not true."

Matthew Reilly, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University with an academic background in Barbadian slavery, asserts that "The Irish slave myth is not supported by the historical evidence." Historians note that unlike slaves, most indentured servants willingly entered into contracts with another person, only served for a finite period, did not pass their unfree status on to their children, and were still considered human. Historian Donald Akenson, writing in If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730, states that on the island of Montserrat, "White indentured servitude was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience." According to Hogan, the debate over the exact definition of slavery, as well as a tendency of some Irish nationalists to gloss over the ways in which Irish people benefitted from the African slave trade, allowed for a grey area in historical discourse that was then seized upon as a political weapon by white supremacists. Fanning writes: ". . .narratives which represent the Irish as having been slaves are hardly harmless. From the 1840s onwards racism was pressed into the service of Irish nationalism. . . versions of Irish history which obfuscate past Irish racisms have proven to be a toxic export . . ."

Irish indentured servants

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_indentured_servants

Modern map of the Caribbean. The Irish went to Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands.

Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the Caribbean (particularly Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands), British North America and later Australia. 

Indentures agreed to provide up to seven years of labor in return for passage to the New World and food, housing, and shelter during their indenture. At the end of this period, their masters were legally required to grant them "freedom dues" in the form of either land or capital. 

Those transported unwillingly were not indentures. They were political prisoners, vagrants, or people who had been defined as "undesirable" by the English state. Penal transportation of Irish people was at its height during the 17th century, during the Cromwellian conquest and settlement of Ireland (1649-1653). During this period, thousands of Irish people were sent to the Caribbean, or "Barbadosed", against their will. Similar practices continued as late as the Victorian period, with Irish political prisoners sent to imperial British penal colonies in Australia. Indentures and transportees have been conflated, though they were distinct.

Historical background

Like the movement of other European people to the Americas, Irish migration to the Caribbean and British North America had complex causes. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were a time of upheaval in Ireland, while English conquest and colonisation, resultant religious persecution, and crop failures (some as a deliberate result of the Tudor conquest of Ireland) drove many Irish people to seek a better life, or survival, elsewhere. Like their English and Scottish counterparts, Irish people were active participants in the "rush for American colonies" during the early seventeenth century. Most travelled to the New World as indentured servants, but others were merchants and landholders who were key players in a variety of different trade and settlement enterprises.

A modern Protestant mural in Belfast celebrating Oliver Cromwell and his activities. It was before and after the Cromwellian conquest that Irish indentured servitude boomed.

Many of the Irish laborers who travelled across the Atlantic from the 1620s did so by choice. However, convict labor had been used in English colonies since the early 1600s, and the forceful transportation of "undesirables" from Ireland to the West Indies had begun under Charles I. The practice took place on a much larger scale during the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the years 1649-58. In the ensuing conquest of Ireland, many prisoners were forcibly sent to the Caribbean islands, particularly to Barbados.

Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish colonies in the Amazon region, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia between 1604 and the 1630s. According to historian Donald Akenson, there were "few if any" Irish being forcibly transported to the New World during this period. Widespread use of forced transportation by the English state did not take place until the 1650s.

Significant numbers of Irish laborers began traveling to colonies such as Virginia, the Leeward Islands, and Barbados in the 1620s. Between 1627 and 1660, laborers from Ireland and Britain crossed the Atlantic in large numbers, with as many as 60 to 65 percent of seventeenth-century migrants being indentured servants. By 1640, large numbers of Irish settlers were present in the West Indies, making up more than half the population of the region by some estimates. Most were indentured laborers, small farmers, or artisans.

The type of labor being used in American colonies shifted dramatically after 1642, as the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Irish Confederate Wars, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms led to a reduction in the number of voluntary migrants, while growing numbers of prisoners of war, political prisoners, felons, and other "undesirables" were sent to labor in the colonies against their will. After the Siege of Drogheda, for example, Cromwell ordered most of the Irish military prisoners who surrendered to be shipped to Barbados. In 1654, the governors of several Irish counties were ordered to arrest "all wanderers, men and women, and such other Irish within their precincts as should not prove they had such a settled course of industry as yielded them a means of their own to maintain them, all such children as were in hospitals or workhouses, all prisoners, men and women, to be transported to the West Indies."

Barbados

George Ayscue, an English Governor of Barbados. He conquered Barbados for the Cromwellian forces in 1651.

Servants who arrived in Barbados between 1640 and 1660 arrived at a time of great change, when the colony was transitioning from tobacco and cotton cultivation to sugar. The resulting "sugar boom" created a massive demand for labor, which prompted a gradual shift from white servant to black slave labor. In 1638, the population of Barbados was about 6,000, with 2,000 of that number being indentured servants and 200 being African slaves. Fifteen years later, the Islands slave population had grown to 20,000, while indentured servants numbered 8,000. There were also more than 1,000 Irish freemen (former indentured servants whose term had expired) living on the island at that time. By 1660, there were 26,200 Europeans and 27,100 African slaves on the Island. During the initial stages of sugar production, white servants sometimes found themselves working side-by-side with black slaves, and according to historian James Dunn, they "became wild and unruly in the extreme" during this period. By the mid-1650s, however, white servants and black slaves no longer worked side-by-side, and by the mid-1660s, white servants were used only in skilled or supervisory roles.

Irish servants on Barbados were often treated poorly, and Barbadian planters gained a reputation for cruelty. The decreased appeal of an indenture on Barbados, combined with enormous demand for labor caused by sugar cultivation, led the use of involuntary transportation to Barbados as a punishment for crimes, or for political prisoners, and also to the kidnapping of laborers who were sent to Barbados involuntarily.

Irish indentured servants were a significant portion of the population throughout the period when white servants were used for plantation labor in Barbados, and while a "steady stream" of Irish servants entered the Barbados throughout the seventeenth century, Cromwellian efforts to pacify Ireland created a "veritable tidal wave" of Irish laborers who were sent to Barbados during the 1650s. Due to inadequate historical records, the total number of Irish laborers sent to Barbados is unknown, and estimates have been "highly contentious." While one historical source estimated that as many as 50,000 Irish people were transported to either Barbados or Virginia unwillingly during the 1650s, this estimate is "quite likely exaggerated." Another estimate that 12,000 Irish prisoners had arrived in Barbados by 1655 has been described as "probably exaggerated" by historian Richard B. Sheridan. According to historian Thomas Bartlett, it is "generally accepted" that approximately 10,000 Irish were sent to the West Indies involuntarily, and approximately 40,000 came as voluntary indentured servants, while many also traveled as voluntary, un-indentured emigrants.

Leeward Islands

Irish people also made up a sizable portion of the Leeward Islands (Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of these Irish were either indentured servants or former servants, and many of them lived "materially impoverished" lives; however, the Leeward Islands were also home to more affluent Irish, who were members of powerful merchant families and had numerous servants themselves.

Unlike Barbados, the Irish population of Montserrat was primarily made up of individuals who had been "recruited to emigrate" by the islands' elite residents (who were often Irish themselves), rather than vagrants or convicts, and some of them had arrived as free laborers rather than as indentured servants.

Treatment

Once indentured, these servants had little control over their destination, as their contracts were sold to local planters on arrival. Ships were often overcrowded, and the mortality rate on voyages could be high: one ship which arrived at Barbados in 1638 had lost eighty of its 350 passengers (23%) to sickness by the time it arrived.

In Barbados, indenture terms of four or five years were common, but those who arrived as prisoners were sometimes sentenced to ten years' indenture.

While all indentured servants were treated harshly, Irish Catholics were also subject to English settlers' "sense of cultural and religious superiority" and considered to be "naturally inferior."^[2] According to historian Jenny Shaw, the Irish people's Catholicism and distinct customs "marked the island's population as fundamentally apart from English civilization". English authorities used this perceived difference "to justify the poor treatment of the Irish Catholics they colonized," as well as to lay claim to Ireland itself. Masters and government authorities were often suspicious of Irish servants, and sometimes targeted them with special restrictions. Legislators in Nevis, for example, passed an act to prevent "papists" from settling on the island or holding public office in 1701 – which was later repealed – while Montserrat also considered similar legislation to exclude Irish from public and militia positions. Authorities in Barbados did not place similar restrictions, but did require Irish people to take an oath of abjuration before voting or holding office. After suspecting that Irish laborers had been involved in a 1692 slave revolt, Barbadian authorities wrote to the crown in 1697, asking them not to send further "Irish rebels" to the colony, "for we want not labourers of that colour to work for us, but men in whom we may confide, to strengthen us."

Comparisons to slavery

Treatment of Irish indentured servants varied widely, and has been the subject of considerable historical debate. Comparisons between the treatment of Irish indentured servants (particularly in Barbados) and the treatment of African slaves have been especially controversial. While most recent academic studies have been careful not to equate indentured servitude with chattel slavery, some historians have nonetheless drawn close comparisons between these two labor systems, and other writers have sometimes conflated them.

According to Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, even historians such as Hilary Beckles (whose work Artuso calls "seminal in the field") have drawn "surprisingly close parallels between the experiences of Africans and Irish in the Caribbean." Beckles has referred to some Irish indentured servants as "temporary chattels" who were kept in "slavelike conditions" and lived in a state "nearer to slavery than freedom." Beckles stops short, however, of suggesting that Irish servants were "'slaves' in the sense that blacks were." Similarly, historian Nini Rodgers has written that Irish indentured servants "were not slaves," but nonetheless argues that the "difference must have seemed academic" to many of them. According to Rodgers, this was particularly true in places such as Barbados, where high death rates sometimes "cancelled out" the primary difference between slaves and servants' experiences: that slavery was permanent while indenture was temporary. Rodgers notes, however, that there were other differences between the experiences of servants and those of slaves: masters provided servants with meat but denied it to slaves, servants received European-style clothes (including shoes) while slaves did not, and the two groups slept in different quarters. According to Rodgers, masters sometimes worked servants harder because they only possessed their service for a limited time, and this fact underscores "the complexity of making comparisons" between slavery and indenture.

According to Kevin Brady, Cromwellian exiles in Barbados held a position that was "between temporary bondage and permanent enslavement," stating that the main difference between the these servants and slaves was that they were not sold as chattel. Brady states that they were often subject to "glaringly inhumane treatment by aristocrats of the planter class" and that they "were not given the material or monetary compensation" usually provided to indentured servants at the end of their term. According to Simon P. Newman, Irish prisoners "were treated with singular brutality" by planters who "disdained them as illiterate Catholic savages."

Other historians, when discussing comparisons between slavery and Irish indentured servitude, have focused on how Irish people were both colonized and colonizers in the Caribbean. According to historian Donald Akenson's study of Irish people on Montserrat, for example, white indentured servitude on the island "was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience," and many Irish people (including former servants) prospered there. Similarly, philosopher Michael J. Monahan has argued that Irish servants in Barbados occupied an ambiguous racial position in the eighteenth century, which separated them both from other Europeans and from African slaves, and could work to their advantage as well as to their detriment. According to Monahan, even the highest "and most likely exaggerated" estimates that as many as fifty thousand Irish laborers were sent to the Caribbean against their will "pales by comparison" to the millions of West African slaves who were sold into slavery, and it is important to avoid what he calls "facile equivocations between the conditions of (at least some) Irish laborers and chattel slaves" or between slavery and involuntary indenture, which "are not the same thing." Monahan nonetheless argues, however, that it is an "important fact" that there were some similarities between the situations of some involuntary indentures and African slaves. He is careful to note, however, that this is not to deny that there were "significant, even crucial differences" between the experiences of involuntary Irish servants and those of slaves.

Some popular and non-academic writers have made much more direct comparisons between the experiences of Irish indentured servants and those of African slaves. Conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier Michael A. Hoffman II, for example, wrote a self-published book in 1993 entitled, "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of The Enslavement of Whites in Early America", in which he argued that chattel slavery and indentured servitude were similar enough to both be called slavery, and sought to recover the "suppressed history" of Irish slavery. In 2000, writer Sean O'Callahan published To Hell or Barbados, which argued that the "Irish white slave trade" had been a key component of the "ethnic cleansing of Ireland" during the eighteenth century. Similarly, television documentary producers Don Jordan and Michael Walsh claimed in their 2008 book White Cargo : The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America that "slavery is not defined by time but by the experience of the subject," and sought to expose the "forgotten history" of white slavery. 

These books have been harshly reviewed by historians. Writing in The Historian, for example, historian Dixie Ray Haggard wrote that Jordan and Walsh had deliberately conflated two very different labor systems by comparing slavery and indenture. According to Haggard, "they fail to acknowledge, or maybe understand, that each institution, slavery and indentured servitude, had its own purpose and position within the colonial economy and society," and chose to "oversimplify and confuse" rather than explore the complexity of colonial history. Similarly, historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote that while Jordan and Walsh were "right to remind us that African slavery was one form of bondage among many," the indentured servants "were not slaves," and "calling them slaves...stretches the meaning of slavery beyond breaking point". According to Nini Rodgers, these works developed out of the "horror of white people being on a level with blacks" which accounts of servants and slaves laboring together had prompted in Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which survived into the new millennium through works such as O'Callaghan's.

Since the books were published, white supremacist and white nationalist groups have adopted the notion of "Irish slavery," often as a means of countering the historical burden of African slavery and black Americans' demands for redress, or of undermining and attacking the Black Lives Matter movement.

Because such memes and social media posts have widely spread the myth in mass-market publications, it prompted scholars and writers such as Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly to speak out against the "myth of Irish slavery."

Decline of indenture

The number of prisoners who were forcibly transported to the New World dropped rapidly after 1650, and "convict transportation never became a reliable source of coerced colonial labor" during the seventeenth century. Penal servitude was considered unsatisfactory by plantation owners: the number of prisoners arriving was too small, and they were considered poor workers. In addition, colonial authorities worried that Irish Catholics would side with French troops in the event of an attack, or conspire with slaves to revolt against plantation owners. Some Irish servants did indeed rebel during a French attack on Saint Kitts during 1666–1667, while others made common cause with slaves during a revolt in Bermuda during 1661. According to historian Abigail Swingen, only about 4,500 convicts were transported to Virginia or the West Indies between 1655 and 1699, while the number of prisoners of war transported during this period was likely less than 5,000-10,000. According to historian Robin Blackburn, a total of about 8,000 Irish captives were sent to the American colonies during the 1650s.

While Irish servants were a substantial portion of the population of Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and Saint Kitts from the seventeenth until the middle of the eighteenth century, then, former indentured servants typically either returned to Europe or migrated to British North American colonies as slave labor increasingly replaced indentured servitude as the primary labor system in these colonies. Some, however, stayed, and their descendants – such as the redlegs of Barbados – still live in the Caribbean today.

Indentured servitude

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude 

 

An indenture signed by Henry Mayer, with an "X", in 1738. This contract bound Mayer to Abraham Hestant of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who had paid for Mayer to travel from Europe.

An indentured servant or indentured laborer is an employee (indenturee) within a system of unfree labor who is bound by a signed or forced contract (indenture) to work without pay for the owner of the indenture for a period of time. The contract often lets the employer sell the labor of an indenturee to a third party. Indenturees usually enter into an indenture for a specific payment or other benefit (such as transportation to a new place), or to meet a legal obligation, such as debt bondage. On completion of the contract, indentured servants were given their freedom, and occasionally plots of land. Indentured servitude was often brutal, with a high percentage of servants dying prior to the expiration of their indentures. In many countries, systems of indentured labor have now been outlawed, and are banned by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a form of slavery.

The Americas

North America

Until the late 18th century, indentured servitude was very common in British North America. It was often a way for poor Europeans to immigrate to the American colonies: they signed an indenture in return for a costly passage. After their indenture expired, the immigrants were free to work for themselves or another employer. It has been argued by at least one economist that indentured servitude occurred largely as "an institutional response to a capital market imperfection".

In some cases, the indenture was made with a ship's master, who sold the indenture to an employer in the colonies. Most indentured servants worked as farm laborers or domestic servants, although some were apprenticed to craftsmen.

The terms of an indenture were not always enforced by American courts, although runaways were usually sought out and returned to their employer.

Between one-half and two-thirds of white immigrants to the American colonies between the 1630s and American Revolution came under indentures. However, while almost half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired, and thus free wage labor was the more prevalent for Europeans in the colonies. Indentured people were numerically important mostly in the region from Virginia north to New Jersey. Other colonies saw far fewer of them. The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was about 500,000; of these 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily, Tomlins estimates that 48% were indentured. About 75% of these were under the age of 25. The age of adulthood for men was 24 years (not 21); those over 24 generally came on contracts lasting about 3 years. Regarding the children who came, Gary Nash reports that "many of the servants were actually nephews, nieces, cousins and children of friends of emigrating Englishmen, who paid their passage in return for their labor once in America."

Several instances of kidnapping for transportation to the Americas are recorded, such as that of Peter Williamson (1730–1799). As historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, "Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]." One "spirit" named William Thiene was known to have spirited away 840 people from Britain to the colonies in a single year. Historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. notes that "Masters given to flogging often did not care whether their victims were black or white."

Indentured servitude was also used by various English and British governments as a punishment for defeated foes in rebellions and civil wars. Oliver Cromwell sent into enforced indentured service thousands of prisoners captured in the 1648 Battle of Preston and the 1651 Battle of Worcester. King James II acted similarly after the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, and use of such measures continued also in the 18th Century.

Indentured servants could not marry without the permission of their master, were sometimes subject to physical punishment and did not receive legal favor from the courts. To ensure that the indenture contract was satisfied completely with the allotted amount of time, the term of indenture was lengthened for female servants if they became pregnant. Upon finishing their term they received "freedom dues" and were set free.

The American Revolution severely limited immigration to the United States, but economic historians dispute its long-term impact. Sharon Salinger argues that the economic crisis that followed the war made long-term labor contracts unattractive. His analysis of Philadelphia's population shows how the percentage of bound citizens fell from 17% to 6.4% over the course of the war. William Miller posits a more moderate theory, stating that "the Revolution...wrought disturbances upon white servitude. But these were temporary rather than lasting". David Galenson supports this theory by proposing that the numbers of British indentured servants never recovered, and that Europeans from other nationalities replaced them.

The American and British governments passed several laws that helped foster the decline of indentures. The UK Parliament's Passenger Vessels Act 1803 regulated travel conditions aboard ships to make transportation more expensive, so as to hinder landlords' tenants seeking a better life. An American law passed in 1833 abolished imprisonment of debtors, which made prosecuting runaway servants more difficult, increasing the risk of indenture contract purchases. The 13th Amendment, passed in the wake of the American Civil War, made indentured servitude illegal in the United States.

Contracts

Through its introduction, the details regarding indentured labor varied across import and export regions and most overseas contracts were made before the voyage with the understanding that prospective migrants were competent enough to make overseas contracts on their own account and that they preferred to have a contract before the voyage.

Most labor contracts made were in increments of five years, with the opportunity to extend another five years. Many contracts also provided free passage home after the dictated labor was completed. However, there were generally no policies regulating employers once the labor hours were completed, which led to frequent ill-treatment.

Caribbean

Indian woman in traditional dress

In 1838, with the abolition of slavery at its onset, the British were in the process of transporting a million Indians out of India and into the Caribbean to take the place of the African slaves(freed in 1833) in indentureship. Women, looking for what they believed would be a better life in the colonies, were specifically sought after and recruited at a much higher rate than men due to the high population of men already in the colonies. However, women had to prove their status as a single and eligible to emigrate, as married women could not leave without their husbands. Many women seeking escape from abusive relationships were willing to take that chance. The Indian Immigration Act of 1883 prevented women from exiting India as widowed or single in order to escape. Arrival in the colonies brought unexpected conditions of poverty, homelessness, and little to no food as the high numbers of emigrants overwhelmed the small villages and flooded the labor market. Many were forced into signing labor contracts that exposed them to the hard field labor on the plantation. Additionally, on arrival to the plantation, single women were 'assigned' a man as they were not allowed to live alone. The subtle difference between slavery and indenture-ship is best seen here as women were still subjected to the control of the plantation owners as well as their newly assigned 'partner'.

A half million Europeans went as indentured servants to the Caribbean (primarily the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean) before 1840.

In 1643, the white population of Barbados was 37,200 (86% of the population). During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, at least 10,000 Scottish and Irish prisoners of war were transported as indentured laborers to the colonies.

There were also reports of kidnappings of Europeans to work as servants. During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, children from England and France were kidnapped and sold into indentured labor in the Caribbean.

Indian indenture system

The Indian indenture system was a system of indenture, a form of debt bondage, by which 3.5 million Indians were transported to various colonies of European powers to provide labour for the (mainly sugar) plantations. It started from the end of slavery in 1833 and continued until 1920. This resulted in the development of large Indian diaspora, which spread from the Indian Ocean (i.e. Réunion and Mauritius) to Pacific Ocean (i.e. Fiji), as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean and Indo-African population. 

The British wanted Indians to work in Natal as workers. But the Indians refused, and as a result, the British introduced the indenture system. On 18 January 1826, the Government of the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion laid down terms for the introduction of Indian labourers to the colony. Each man was required to appear before a magistrate and declare that he was going voluntarily. The contract was for five years with pay of ₹8 (12¢ US) per month and rations provided labourers had been transported from Pondicherry and Karaikal. The first attempt at importing Indian labour into Mauritius, in 1829, ended in failure, but by 1834, with abolition throughout most of the British Empire, transportation of Indian labour to the island gained pace. By 1838, 25,000 Indian labourers had been shipped to Mauritius.

After the end of slavery, the West Indian sugar colonies tried the use of emancipated slaves, families from Ireland, Germany and Malta and Portuguese from Madeira. All these efforts failed to satisfy the labour needs of the colonies due to high mortality of the new arrivals and their reluctance to continue working at the end of their indenture. On 16 November 1844, the British Indian Government legalised emigration to Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara (Guyana). The first ship, the Whitby, sailed from Port Calcutta for British Guiana on 13 January 1838, and arrived in Berbice on 5 May 1838. Transportation to the Caribbean stopped in 1848 due to problems in the sugar industry and resumed in Demerara and Trinidad in 1851 and Jamaica in 1860.

The Indian indenture system was finally banned in 1917. According to The Economist, "When the Indian Legislative Council finally ended indenture...it did so because of pressure from Indian nationalists and declining profitability, rather than from humanitarian concerns."

Oceania

Convicts transported to the Australian colonies before the 1840s often found themselves hired out in a form of indentured labor. Indentured servants also emigrated to New South Wales. The Van Diemen's Land Company used skilled indentured labor for periods of seven years or less. A similar scheme for the Swan River area of Western Australia existed between 1829 and 1832.

During the 1860s planters in Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the Samoa Islands, in need of laborers, encouraged a trade in long-term indentured labor called "blackbirding". At the height of the labor trade, more than one-half the adult male population of several of the islands worked abroad.

Over a period of 40 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, labor for the sugar-cane fields of Queensland, Australia included an element of coercive recruitment and indentured servitude of the 62,000 South Sea Islanders. The workers came mainly from Melanesia – mainly from the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – with a small number from Polynesian and Micronesian areas such as Samoa, the Gilbert Islands (subsequently known as Kiribati) and the Ellice Islands (subsequently known as Tuvalu). They became collectively known as "Kanakas".

It remains unknown how many Islanders the trade controversially kidnapped. Whether the system legally recruited Islanders, persuaded, deceived, coerced or forced them to leave their homes and travel by ship to Queensland remains difficult to determine. Official documents and accounts from the period often conflict with the oral tradition passed down to the descendants of workers. Stories of blatantly violent kidnapping tend to relate to the first 10–15 years of the trade.

Australia deported many of these Islanders back to their places of origin in the period 1906–1908 under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901.

Australia's own colonies of Papua and New Guinea (joined after the Second World War to form Papua New Guinea) were the last jurisdictions in the world to use indentured servitude.

Africa

A significant number of construction projects, principally British, in East Africa and South Africa, required vast quantities of labor, exceeding the availability or willingness of local tribesmen. Coolies from India were imported, frequently under indenture, for such projects as the Uganda Railway, as farm labor, and as miners. They and their descendants formed a significant portion of the population and economy of Kenya and Uganda, although not without engendering resentment from others. Idi Amin's expulsion of the "Asians" from Uganda in 1972 was an expulsion of Indo-Africans.

The majority of the population of Mauritius are descendants of Indian indentured labourers brought in between 1834 and 1921. Initially brought to work the sugar estates following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire an estimated half a million indentured laborers were present on the island during this period. Aapravasi Ghat, in the bay at Port Louis and now a UNESCO site, was the first British colony to serve as a major reception centre for slaves and indentured servants for British plantation labour.

Legal status

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948) declares in Article 4 "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms". More specifically, It is dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.

However, only national legislation can establish the unlawfulness of indentured labor in a specific jurisdiction. In the United States, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) of 2000 extended servitude to cover peonage as well as Involuntary Servitude.

Slave ship

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_ship

A plan of the British slave ship Brookes, showing how 454 slaves were accommodated on board. This same ship had reportedly carried as many as 609 people; published by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Slave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves. Such ships were also known as "Guineamen" because their trade involved trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa.

Atlantic slave trade

In the early 1600s, more than a century after the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, demand for unpaid labor to work plantations made slave-trading a profitable business. The peak time of slave ships to the Atlantic passage was between the 18th and early-19th centuries, when large plantations developed in the southern colonies of North America.

To ensure profitability, the owners of the ships divided their hulls into holds with little headroom, so they could transport as many slaves as possible. Unhygienic conditions, dehydration, dysentery and scurvy led to a high mortality rate, on average 15% and up to a third of captives. Often the ships carried hundreds of slaves, who were chained tightly to plank beds. For example, the slave ship Henrietta Marie carried about 200 slaves on the long Middle Passage. They were confined to cargo holds with each slave chained with little room to move.

The most significant routes of the slave ships led from the north-western and western coasts of Africa to South America and the south-east coast of what is today the United States, and the Caribbean. As many as 20 million Africans were transported by ship. The transportation of slaves from Africa to America was known as the Middle Passage of the triangular trade.

Conditions on slave ships

Enslaved people

A painting c.1830 by the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas depicts a scene below deck of a slave ship headed to Brazil; Rugendas had been an eyewitness to the scene

 

The owners of slave ships held as many enslaved people as possible by cramming, chaining, and selectively grouping slaves to maximize space and make travel more profitable. Slaves on board were underfed and treated brutally causing many to die before even arriving at their destination; dead or dying slaves were dumped overboard. These people were not treated as human, living like animals throughout their long voyage to the New World. It took an average of one to two months to complete the journey. The enslaved people were naked and shackled together with several different types of chains, stored on the floor beneath bunks with little to no room to move due to the cramped conditions. Some captains would assign Slave Guardians to watch over and keep the other slaves in check. They spent a large portion of time pinned to floorboards which would wear skin on their elbows down to the bone. Firsthand accounts from former slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano, describe the horrific conditions that enslaved people were forced to endure.

The Slave Trade Act 1788, also known as Dolben's Act, regulated conditions on board British slave ships for the first time since the slave trade started. It was introduced to the United Kingdom parliament by Sir William Dolben, an advocate for the abolition of slavery. For the first time, limits were placed on the number of enslaved people that could be carried. Under the terms of the act, ships could transport 1.67 slaves per ton up to a maximum of 207 tons burthen, after which only one slave per ton could be carried. The well-known slave ship Brookes was limited to carrying 454 people; it had previously transported as many as 609 enslaved. Olaudah Equiano was among the supporters of the act but it was opposed by some abolitionists, such as William Wilberforce, who feared it would establish the idea that the slave trade simply needed reform and regulation, rather than complete abolition. Slave counts can also be estimated by deck area rather than registered tonnage, which results in a lower number of errors and only 6% deviation from reported figures.

This limited reduction in the overcrowding on slave ships may have reduced the on-board death rate, but this is disputed by some historians.

Sailors and crew

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the sailors on slave ships were often poorly paid and subject to brutal discipline and treatment. Furthermore, a crew mortality rate of around 20% was expected during a voyage, with sailors dying as a result of disease, flogging or slave uprisings. While conditions for the crew were far better than those of the enslaved people, they remained harsh and contributed to a high death rate. Sailors often had to live and sleep without shelter on the open deck for the entirety of the Atlantic voyage as the space below deck was occupied by slaves.

Disease, specifically malaria and yellow fever, was the most common cause of death among sailors. A high crew mortality rate on the return voyage was in the captain's interests as it reduced the number of sailors who had to be paid on reaching the home port. Crew members who survived were frequently cheated out of their wages on their return.

These aspects of the slave trade were widely known; the notoriety of slave ships amongst sailors meant those joining slave ship crews did so through coercion or because they could find no other employment. This was often the case for sailors who had spent time in prison.

Abolition of the slave trade

The former slave ship HMS Black Joke (left) fires on the Spanish ship El Almirante before capturing her, January 1829 (painting by Nicholas Matthews Condy)

The African slave trade was outlawed by the United States and the United Kingdom in 1807. The applicable UK act was the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and outlawed the slave trade throughout the British Empire. The US law took effect on 1 January 1808. After that date, all US and British slave ships leaving Africa were legally pirate vessels subject to capture by the United States Navy or Royal Navy. In 1815, at the Council of Vienna, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands also agreed to abolish their slave trade. Between 1807 and 1860 British vessels would capture slave ships and free the slaves; they captured 1,600 ships and freed 160,000 slaves in this time.

After abolition, slave ships adopted quicker, more maneuverable forms to evade capture by naval warships, one favorite form being the Baltimore Clipper. Some had hulls fitted with copper sheathing. This was very expensive work that at this time was only commonly done to Royal Navy vessels; however, it increased speed by preventing the growth of marine weed on the hull, which would otherwise cause drag. The speed of slave ships made them attractive ships to repurpose for piracy, and also made them attractive for naval use after capture; USS Nightingale and HMS Black Joke were examples of such vessels. HMS Black Joke had a notable career in Royal Navy service and was responsible for capturing a number of slave ships and freeing many hundreds of slaves.

There have been attempts by descendants of African slaves to sue Lloyd's of London for playing a key role in underwriting insurance policies taken out on slave ships bringing slaves from Africa to the Americas.

La Rochelle slave ship Le Saphir ex-voto, 1741

 

Images showing how the slaves were transported on the ships

 

Diagram of a four-deck large slave ship. Thomas Clarkson: The cries of Africa to the inhabitants of Europe, 1822?

 

Turner's The Slave Ship

 

The slave-ship Veloz, illustrated in 1830. It held over 550 slaves.

List of slave ships

• Antelope, Spanish slave ship captured near Florida in 1820 with 283 slaves aboard, leading to The Antelope case.
• Aurore, along with Duc du Maine, the first French slave ships that brought the first slaves to Louisiana.
• La Amistad, general-purpose cargo ship that also carried slaves on occasion. A successful slave revolt on ship gave rise to a case that reached the Supreme Court in United States v. The Amistad.
• Brookes, sailing in the 1780s.
• City of Norfolk, fitted out in New York City by Albert Horn.
• Clotilda, burned and sunk at Mobile, in 1859 or 1860.
• Cora, captured by USS Constellation in 1860.
• Creole, involved in the United States coastwise slave trade and the scene of a slave rebellion in 1841, leading to the Creole case.
• Desire, first American slave ship.
• Duc du Maine, along with Aurore, the first French slave ships that brought the first slaves to Louisiana.
• Elisabeth, sailing from Jamaica for West Africa.
• Esmeralda, captured 1 November 1864 off Loango, West Coast of Africa, by HMS Rattler (1864) and Taken to St. Helena to prize court by C.G. Nelson midshipman in command.
• Fredensborg, Danish slave ship, sank in 1768 off Tromøya in Norway, after a journey in the triangular trade. Leif Svalesen [da] wrote a book about the journey.
• Gallito, Spanish slave ship carrying 136 Africans when captured by HMS Nimble 16 November 1829.
• Guerrero, Spanish slave ship wrecked in the Florida Keys in 1827 carrying 561 Africans.
• Hannibal, an English slaver of the Atlantic slave trade.
• The Hawk, The Hawk sailed for Calabar, with instructions to buy 340 slaves.
• Hebe, Portuguese slave ship carrying 401 Angolans when captured by HMS Nimble 13 July 1832.
• Henrietta Marie, sank in 1700 near Marquesas Keys, Florida, excavated in 1980s.
• Hermosa, a schooner whose 1840 grounding in the Bahamas led to a controversy between the US and Britain over the 38 slaves who had been on board the ship.
• Hope, American brig that brought slaves to Rhode Island
• Isabella, British slave ship that brought the first 150 African slaves to the American port of Philadelphia in 1684.
• Joaquina, Spanish slave ship carrying 348 Africans when captured by HMS Nimble 10 November 1833.
• Josefa, Spanish schooner carrying 206 slaves when captured by HMS Monkey 7 April 1829.
• Jesus of Lübeck, a 700-ton ship used on the second voyage of John Hawkins to transport 400 captured Africans in 1564. Queen Elizabeth I was his partner and rented him the vessel.
• King David, sailing from St Christophers, on St Kitts in the Caribbean 1749.
• La Concord, a slave ship captured by the pirate Blackbeard (Edward Teach), used as his flagship and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge. Run aground in June 1718.
• La Negrita, Spanish slave ship carrying 189 Africans when captured by HMS Nimble May 1833.
• Lord Ligonier. See Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley.
• Don Francisco, a slave ship captured in 1837. Sold as a colonial trader and renamed James Matthews. Excavated by Western Australian Museum in 1974.
• Madre de Deus, 1567. John Hawkins captured this ship and transported 400 Africans.
• Manuela, built as clipper ship Sunny South, captured by HMS Brisk in Mozambique Channel with over 800 slaves aboard.
• Manuelita, Spanish slave ship carrying 485 Africans when captured by HMS Nimble 7 December 1833.
• Margaret Scott, confiscated and sunk as part of the Stone fleet in 1862
• Meermin, a Dutch East India Company ship active between southern Africa and Madagascar, whose final voyage in 1766 ended in mutiny by the slaves: around half the crew and nearly 30 Malagasy died, and the ship was destroyed.
• Midas, 360-ton Spanish slave ship captured by HMS Monkey 27 June 1829. Midas had left Africa in April 1829 with 562 Africans, but only 369 were still alive when she was captured, and 72 more died of "smallpox, diarrhea & scurvy" before Monkey and HMS Nimble could take Midas into Havana.
• Nightingale, clipper ship captured by Saratoga near Cabinda, Angola in 1861 with 961 slaves aboard.
• Pons, American-built barque captured by USS Yorktown on 1 December 1845 with 850–900 slaves.
• Providencia, Spanish brig carrying 400 slaves when captured by HMS Monkey in 1829.
• São José Paquete Africa, a Portuguese slave ship which sank off the coast of South Africa in 1794 killing over 200 of the enslaved men and women.
• Tecora, Portuguese slave ship that transported the slaves who would later revolt aboard La Amistad.
• Triton captured by USS Constellation in 1861.
• Trouvadore, wrecked in Turks and Caicos 1841. 193 slaves survived. Project commenced in 2004 to locate the ship.
• Wanderer, formerly last slave ship to the U.S. (November 1858) until Clotilda reported in 1859 or 1860.
• Wildfire, a barque, arrested off the Florida coast by the US Navy in 1860; carrying 450 slaves.
• Whydah Gally, a ship that transported cargo, passengers, and slaves. Captured by the pirate Captain Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy and used for piracy, eventually grounded during a Nor'easter at Cape Cod and sunk in April 1717.
• Zong, a British slave ship infamous for the 1781 massacre of 132 sick and dying slaves who were thrown overboard in an attempt to guarantee that the ship's owners could collect on their cargo insurance.