From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English

conceited

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.

Authors Bio: Media Consultant that cares about the future of America and the endless possibilities this nation possesses.
Posted: 4/14/08
OpEd News

Fratton Fred

confederate wars

Dan South

Do always give your sources when asserting minor matters such as 500,000 killed plus 300,00 enslaved.

You do want to be taken seriously don`t you?

Do you really want people to think that maybe you make things up?

Pgibson

The English regarded Ireland as "primitive".

Why?

Read the English poet Edmund Spenser in his own words:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/veue1.html

Spenser wrote it in Kilcolman Castle, Doneraile,Co. Cork:

http://www.libraryireland.com/IrishPictures/IV-Kilcolman-Castle.php

(I am led to believe that Spenser is from the same family as Diana Spenser..better known to us as Princess Diana.)

.

mike65

http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html

which links to

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0929903056/africangenesis

Mike

Pgibson

One of the most celebrated events in English history was the sale of English slaves in the Roman slave market.

When Pope Gregory and his retinue was passing the market he noticed a sea of blonde hair in one corner.

He admired their physical beauty and asked “What tribe do those slaves belong to?”

The Answer was “Angli” (“Angles” as in Anglo-Saxon)

That is like the Latin for “Angels”.

He said “Non Angli Sed Angeli.”

“ Not Angles ,they are Angels” .

Little did he know!

Artist’s impression:

http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Pope-Gregory-Sees-English-Slaves-in-Rome-Non-Angli-Sed-Angeli-He-is-Supposed-to-Have-Said-Posters_i1861689_.htm


Afterwords he ordered Augustine to go and Christianise the English.

Augustine based himself in Canterbury, to this day the centre of English Christianity.
The rest is history:

http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Augustine-Preaching-Christianity-to-Ethelbert-1-King-of-England-Posters_i1861807_.htm

conceited

http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html

As I can't edit my post thats the link to it.
I've looked up this information about the english breeding irish women with blacks . The jews had a walk in the park compared to us.
Why hasn't there been a film about this? Or is it no one has the balls to produce and show it?

Pgibson

conceited wrote: »

The jews had a walk in the park compared to us.

What a whingeing, disgusting,self-pitying,blatant conceited LIE.

Get a grip "conceited".

.

Snickers Man

There's no doubt that Irish people were sent as slaves to the Carribean, particularly aroudn the time of Cromwell. But there are one or two factual errors in the OP that I can spot off the top of my head without even looking anything up.

The first is that it was not the Good Catholic James II, on whose behalf the Irish catholics went to warn in 1689 against his usurper son in law William of Orange, who signed a proclamation in 1625 sending Irish slaves to the West Indies. It was his miserable Scottish protestant grandfather James I. I suspect James II wasn't even born in 1625.

And equating "Indentured Servants" with "Slaves" is a little disingenuous. The lower orders didn't have it easy in the 18th or 19th centuries, sure enough. But calling them slaves is an exaggeration. Just as it is in the case of that little ponce who plays for Manchester United and wants to move to Real.

Pgibson

The following passage is PURE FICTION:

“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.”

Isn’t it strange that the author, John Martin, seems to be the only person who can remember this monumental national calamity.

Strange too that he publishes it in an African American website where the people wouldn’t be expected to know much about Ireland.

I wonder how much money he was paid for writing such garbage.

For a less dishonest picture of the Irish population of the time look here:

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=102601988

Quote:
“The sustained RISE of the Irish population through two
and a half centuries began in 1600.....
If population in Ireland increased more rapidly than in
Europe it was not solely because the birth rate was a good deal
higher. Its death rate fell sharply also, in some measure
because its diet, very archaic by European standards, became
more varied and stable. This change, however, was somewhat
protracted, and the decline in epidemic diseases, especially.”

.

Hookey

The numbers here look a bit fishy to me; I've no doubt that there were plenty of Irish slaves, but there is a difference between a "slave" and an "indentured servant", and the way this article reads seems to imply that it was a specific anti-Irish policy on the part of the English/British; it wasn't. The British shipped hundreds of thousands of transportees to the new world from all over the British Isles, and they did it from 1615 to around 1780, when American transportation ended and Australian transportation began to take off. There were probably far more transportees from London alone than there were from Ireland during this period (not to mention the Scots transported during the Highland Clearances). This isn't to minimise an apprecation of transportees suffering, but its disengenous to claim this was some kind of Irish-specific ethnic cleansing.

Once transported, lots of transportees were simply dumped on the beach, and then sold themselves into indentured servitude in order to survive (which, ironically, became increasingly difficult with the rise in the African slave trade), or in the case of the transportees sent to the mainland, headed off to the interior, where their descendants live in places like the Appalachians to this day. Even once in the new world, the British would often re-transport rebellious groups to other parts of the Caribbean if they revolted or refused to pay their taxes (visit the islands off Honduras and you'll find English-speaking black populations who's ancestors were re-transported this way).

I guess my point is, don't think you're anything special if you're Irish, the powers-that-be in Britain treated their own just as badly.

getz

the british did treat the english welsh and scots very much the same way -anyone convicted of a crime was sent to the colonies australia west indies ect-the difference was that a lot of irish femails went to the west indies because the plantation masters wanted white femails instead of black-also they was not slaves they could work there freedom after a time this also happend in other countrys spain ,france portugal ,netherlands,-and all empire building countrys -it was illegal to have a white slave at that time- it was even done in the name of the catholic church in south america-stories are told of priests bringing over white femails to look after there clerical interests [no i dont mean the nuns] but you try to prove it -no chance-

ilkhanid

"The jews had a walk in the park compared to us."

Ah, yes indeed.The famous M.O.P.E

kevinmyarse

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling).

This proves the Irish were probably indentured servants who could only be held for a certain period and had many more rights than a black slave.

MarchDub

There is a growing scholarly interest in the fact of Irish slavery - here are a few data points. One is an article on the Kavanagh family and another a book review by ReadIreland on "To Hell or Barbados" by Sean O'Callaghan .


http://www.kavanaghfamily.com/articles/2003/20030618jfc.htm

http://www.readireland.ie/botmnf/nfic-dec00.html