Slavery was wrong no matter- The history of the African slave trade into the Americas is well-documented as well as largely taught in American schools today. However, as John Martin of the Montreal-based Center for Research and Globalization points out in his article ‘The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves,’ it was not just Africans who were traded as slaves. Indeed, the Irish have a gruesome history of being traded as slaves as well, and subjected to similar and sometimes worse treatment than their African contemporaries of the time. Strangely though, the history of Irish and ‘white’ slavery is by and large ignored in the American educational curriculum today. In his article, John Martin writes “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 percent 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.”
Posted on: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:41:51 +0000