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Irish slaves myth
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Irish slaves myth
The Irish slaves myth is a fringe pseudohistorical narrative that conflates the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries with the hereditary chattel slavery experienced by the forebears of the African diaspora.
Some white nationalists, and others who want to minimize the effects of hereditary chattel slavery on Africans and their descendants, have used this false equivalence to deny racism against African Americans or claim that African Americans are too vocal in seeking justice for historical grievances. It also can hide the facts around 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. According to historians Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, "it is misleading, if not erroneous, to apply the term 'slave' to Irish and other indentured servants in early Barbados". In 2016, academics and Irish historians wrote to condemn the myth.
Common elements to memes that propagate the myth are:
During British rule in Ireland, and particularly during the Plantations of Ireland and the Cromwellian conquest, the terms "slaves" or "bond slaves" were sometimes used to describe the time-bound system of servitude of tens of thousands of Irish. The official legal terminology used was "indentured servants" whether the servants in question had willingly signed the indenture contract to emigrate to the Americas or were forced to go. In any other form, those transported unwillingly were not considered to be indentured. This included political prisoners, vagrants, convicts, prostitutes, or people who had been defined as "undesirable" by the British government.
Penal transportation of Irish people was at its height during the 17th century, most was for various felonies such as highway robbery, vagrancy (homelessness), burglary, and horse theft. Penal transportation was a general practice in Great Britain as well as Ireland. These were the offences most often punished with transportation for men in the 1670s, though for women it was theft. They were then subjected to forced labour for a given period when they arrived in the Americas or Australia. During this same period, the Atlantic slave trade was transporting millions of Africans across the Atlantic and bringing them to various European colonies in America (including British America) where they were purchased by European colonists and put to work.
Treatment of Irish indentured servants varied widely, but the transport, physical work, and living conditions have been compared by scholars to the treatment of enslaved Africans. However, the usual period of indenture for an Irish person was from four years to nine years, after which they were free – able to travel freely, own property, and accumulate wealth. Additionally, the formerly indentured Irish person could now marry whom they chose and their children were born free. Unlike Irish indentured servants, enslaved Africans generally were made slaves for life and this perpetual slave status was imposed on their children at birth.
Both systematically and legally, enslaved Africans were subjected to a lifelong, inheritable condition of slavery that indentured Irish people never were. Donald Harman Akenson makes the point that in this "white indentured servitude was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience". Additionally, in terms of numbers, the "most likely exaggerated" high estimates of Irish laborers sent to the Caribbean, along with estimates of total numbers of prisoners and indentured servants in British America, "pales by comparison" to the millions of enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas."
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Irish slaves myth
The Irish slaves myth is a fringe pseudohistorical narrative that conflates the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries with the hereditary chattel slavery experienced by the forebears of the African diaspora.
Some white nationalists, and others who want to minimize the effects of hereditary chattel slavery on Africans and their descendants, have used this false equivalence to deny racism against African Americans or claim that African Americans are too vocal in seeking justice for historical grievances. It also can hide the facts around 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. According to historians Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, "it is misleading, if not erroneous, to apply the term 'slave' to Irish and other indentured servants in early Barbados". In 2016, academics and Irish historians wrote to condemn the myth.
Common elements to memes that propagate the myth are:
During British rule in Ireland, and particularly during the Plantations of Ireland and the Cromwellian conquest, the terms "slaves" or "bond slaves" were sometimes used to describe the time-bound system of servitude of tens of thousands of Irish. The official legal terminology used was "indentured servants" whether the servants in question had willingly signed the indenture contract to emigrate to the Americas or were forced to go. In any other form, those transported unwillingly were not considered to be indentured. This included political prisoners, vagrants, convicts, prostitutes, or people who had been defined as "undesirable" by the British government.
Penal transportation of Irish people was at its height during the 17th century, most was for various felonies such as highway robbery, vagrancy (homelessness), burglary, and horse theft. Penal transportation was a general practice in Great Britain as well as Ireland. These were the offences most often punished with transportation for men in the 1670s, though for women it was theft. They were then subjected to forced labour for a given period when they arrived in the Americas or Australia. During this same period, the Atlantic slave trade was transporting millions of Africans across the Atlantic and bringing them to various European colonies in America (including British America) where they were purchased by European colonists and put to work.
Treatment of Irish indentured servants varied widely, but the transport, physical work, and living conditions have been compared by scholars to the treatment of enslaved Africans. However, the usual period of indenture for an Irish person was from four years to nine years, after which they were free – able to travel freely, own property, and accumulate wealth. Additionally, the formerly indentured Irish person could now marry whom they chose and their children were born free. Unlike Irish indentured servants, enslaved Africans generally were made slaves for life and this perpetual slave status was imposed on their children at birth.
Both systematically and legally, enslaved Africans were subjected to a lifelong, inheritable condition of slavery that indentured Irish people never were. Donald Harman Akenson makes the point that in this "white indentured servitude was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience". Additionally, in terms of numbers, the "most likely exaggerated" high estimates of Irish laborers sent to the Caribbean, along with estimates of total numbers of prisoners and indentured servants in British America, "pales by comparison" to the millions of enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas."
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