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? 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 also 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://www.globalresearch.ca/the-irish-slave-trade-the-forgotten-white-slaves/31076

TG posted:

the question is, is it racist to talk about whites enslaving other whites the same way its racist to mention how africans sold other africans into slavery to europeans? or is the real crime trying to imply that the irish are white?

i hope it's not racist to talk about africans selling africans to europeans because the legacy of humans-as-chattel in the cameroonian grasslands has a lot of intense transmuted cultural results that persist to this day, and i can't stop talking about it at dinner parties and soirees.

palafox posted:

a variety of interesting creation myths w/r/t the precolonial states in the grasslands that valorize those perpetrating massacres and taking chattel, both of which were prevalent practices, and that demean its victims as witches, outsiders, and social dead weight-

this sounds like lots of creation myths. even lykourgos should remember the slavery and oppression in the iliad, and the portrayal of people not part of the in-group of the state (thersites). does this take a particularly vicious form in these stories?

c_man posted:

palafox posted:

a variety of interesting creation myths w/r/t the precolonial states in the grasslands that valorize those perpetrating massacres and taking chattel, both of which were prevalent practices, and that demean its victims as witches, outsiders, and social dead weight-

this sounds like lots of creation myths. even lykourgos should remember the slavery and oppression in the iliad, and the portrayal of people not part of the in-group of the state (thersites). does this take a particularly vicious form in these stories?

yes, quite (i see you pumping me for atrocity porn, don't think i don't), and even more so given the context of what came after. the knownish facts of the grasslands were that it was, prior to being organized in violent polities in the 1890s, a target for slave-capture across many different generations and ethnic groups both homogenous and heterogenous (in other words, both blood-meridianesqe raiding parties and actual communities oriented around acquiring slaves). many of the aforementioned violent polities were extant prior to this but were not nearly as militaristic. the actual known facts around this, both prior to and as a result of colonial intervention, are obscenely bloody in and of themselves. the various states prior to documentation (16th century? there isn't western documentation until the 19th i think, and nothing truly thorough until the 20th century) were, on the whole, likely derived from slavery-directed nomads supplanting previous inhabitants, which was a process that repeated over and over and over and over again.

the creation myths from supplanting peoples (that were later themselves supplanted) tend to represent this. a goddess closely linked with a founder-king that turns into a lake and drowns all of people that live underground, but who do not die until the founder king bests the underground ruler in single combat. a different myth of this founder king says that he set a magical fire that ringed around the underground people as they went above ground to gather grass one day. one group says that its own ancestors were burned to death in a house by their neighbors and that they fled to their current land after. another says that its ancestors won their lands by duping their neighbors, who were buried alive in a pit trap after being invited to a feast. those killed in these myths (who aren't viewed as ancestral) are usually people from underground, occasionally the forest, who were wanderers- usually phrased derisively, in ironic contrast to the just as nomadic founder-kings of many groups- with occasional magical characteristics who tended to be killed by a combination of magic and cleverness. when looked at in the light of the genocide, exocide, and filicide suffusing the lives of the people who passed these stories down the relentless commonalities between all these stories horrifies and disgusts. It's like the constant mentions of "unspeakable ancient abstracted horrors grown pervasive and virulent" in cyclonopedia but born out of actual lived human experience, not the urge to shock some professors in a room somewhere.

gwap posted:

jools posted:

oh ffs

i assumed you would be grateful, fucker

no because "multiculturalism" is nothing more than a phantom used to attack lived multicultural sociality that is far more prosaic than any of that shit