Irish Indentured Servants in the Caribbean

How did you get started debunking the Irish slave myth online?

Around 2012, I read Nini Rodgers' ground-breaking book Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, which looked at Ireland in the context of the Black Atlantic world and racial slavery in Colonial America. She concluded that these European slavocracies had a major impact on Ireland. On a local level I was stunned to discover such details that Frederick Douglass spoke in Limerick or that Limerick merchants attempted to set up a slave trading company in 1784. It was a surreal feeling to discover that the 18th-century building that I worked in was built by Philip Roche, the most successful provisioner of the British West Indies in Limerick.

I then set out to explore Limerick's historical relationship with racial slavery and began to publish articles from an Irish perspective. I noticed that the most popular comment below one article was a piece of propaganda full of basic errors and false equivalences that suggested, "We were slaves too," I soon realized that this was a copy-and-paste text which had proliferated all over the social Web. It needed to be challenged.

So what is the reality about the history of Irish unfree colonial labor?

While the majority of Irish people who became indentured servants in the colonies did so willingly (why they felt they had to so is, of course, another question), a not insignificant number were forcibly deported and sold into indentured servitude. This peaked just after the brutal Cromwellian conquest of Ireland when there were orders given in multiple counties to round up and deport those who, it was claimed, could not support themselves.

Indentured servitude was more insidious than simply a case of labor exploitation. A four- to seven-year indenture to serve out, bond servants lives' and movements were subject to control and dominance by their masters' even outside of work hours, with punitive restrictions placed on marriage, locomotion, and pregnancy.

So there were both voluntary and involuntary servants. What's the difference?

The laws were the same. Both were treated as servants and had a predetermined length of time to serve before they were freed. In Barbados the customary length of time to serve in the 1650s was between five or seven years, but in 1661 a new law was introduced that reduced this to between four to two years. This "custom" was altered by colonial administrators to attract servants to migrate to their colonies and it was also used to single out the Irish when they were not wanted. In 1655 harsh laws were passed in Virginia that targeted Irish servants who arrived in the colony without indentures. These terms for adults were two years longer than those that applied to other "Christian servants," and three years longer for those under 1​6 years of age. But by 1660 (the Restoration) the law was repealed.

Meanwhile, you're telling me that some Irish people profited directly and indirectly from the Caribbean slave trade?

Yes, absolutely. In Ireland it was mainly indirect via the provisions trade. It primarily benefited the Protestant Ascendancy, the Catholic elites, and the Catholic middle class who dominated trade in the cities. Many of our merchants (whether Catholic, Protestant, Huguenot, or Quaker) made fortunes trading with all of the slavocracies in the Caribbean. Shoes for enslaved people were manufactured in Belfast; and as mainly poor Irish Catholic tenants were forced off the land to make way for livestock, butter, beef, and pork were salted and exported to the colonies in enormous quantities via Cork, Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick.

These provisions, especially cheap in Ireland, were essential for the operation of the slave labor camps as their constant supply meant that all the majority of the land could be used solely for cash crops (sugar cane, etc.)

So Irish peasants lost their land to make way for cattle, which was then exported by Irish landlords to feed enslaved peoples, who didn't grow food of their own because the land was too valuable for making sugar. And then presumably Irish people bought sugar and rum?

Yes, the provisions exported from Ireland fed slaves, servants, overseers, and planters. Herring, pork, beef, and butter and so on. One cut of beef exported out of Cork was known as "Planters Beef." And in the other direction a flood of slave-produced goods were sold in Ireland (sugar, tobacco, etc.). Every newspaper in Ireland in the 18th century carries adverts for sugar from Barbados or Jamaica being sold by a local grocer. By 1770 the Irish market absorbed nearly 90 percent of Antigua's total rum exports and in 1774 Dublin imported 108,821 gallons of rum from Antigua. Many merchants in the colonies paid for their Irish provisions in slave produce.

Were there Irish people more directly involved in the slave trade? Were there Irish slavers?

Navigation laws ensured a monopoly for English and Scottish slavers. Some Irish sailors migrated to slave hubs like Liverpool, Bristol, and Nantes and became slave traders. An example of this is David Tuohy, from Tralee, County Kerry. He settled in Liverpool in the 1750s and captained at least four slave trading voyages from 1766 to 1771. By 1772 he had made enough money to become a slave ship owner and he was the part-owner of 10 Liverpool slave ships from 1772 to 1786.

For many of the Irish diaspora the profiteering was direct through slave ownership or employment as overseers. My survey of the slave schedules suggests that slave owners with recognizably Irish surnames owned over 110,000 slaves in the United States in 1860.

Given all this, why has the myth of the Irish slaves lasted so long?

Firstly, I think we need to be precise about what it is we are labeling a myth and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The "Irish slaves" myth that we contend with today is a relatively new manifestation (approximately two decades old) and refers to the drawing of a false equivalence with racialized perpetual hereditary chattel slavery and/or the refusal to delineate servitude and slavery. All the exaggerations and fabrications are secondary to the core mythos that "slavery was slavery" in the 17th-century Anglo-Caribbean.

But the concept of Irish people being enslaved in the Caribbean by Cromwellian forces is contemporary with the events themselves and is based on historical truth. This is why I have always referred to it in quotes, as a way of separating the present day propaganda from its use by Irish people who described it as slavery in the general sense at the time. The challenge in this discourse is identifying what [slavery] means in the past and the present.

Can we blame the English?

Cromwell's "Irish slaves" are canon in Irish nationalist historiography. It is rarely explained that this "slavery" was in the form of involuntary indentured servitude for a fixed period of time. You see it referred to all down the line from James Connolly's Re-Conquest of Ireland (1915) which claimed that "over 100,000 men, women and children were transported to the West Indies, there to be sold into slavery" to Daniel O'Connell's speech in Mallow in 1843 when he asserted that "80,000 Irishmen [were] sent to [the West Indies] to work as slaves." But these were rhetorical claims, based on truth, but greatly exaggerated for effect and are not to be confused with historical accuracy.​

This certificate of freedom, dated June 5th, 1838, demonstrates that an Irish convict, Francis Neill, has completed his seven years of obligatory labor in the penal colony of New South Wales, Australia.



As an Irish pub musician, I think a lot about the sense of belligerent victimhood in 20th-century Irish culture. Is that part of what's going on here?

[There's] a selective memory about who we identify with [in] the colonization of the New World. There exists this sense that this complicity with imperial projects was individualist rather than connected to any the notion of Irish identity. Post-independence, a line was drawn by nationalists that everything that happened prior to this was to be laid at the door of British Empire. It's of course a bit more complicated than that and as one might expect in a post-colonial state, our national story is presented as a linear history, a journey from bondage to liberation.

This explains why some Irish people express shock when informed that many of our kin were say, slave owners in America or involved and benefited from the dispossession of indigenous peoples lands across multiple continents. The cognitive dissonance that follows often leads to the knee-jerk response: "Were they really Irish though?"

The deeper problem here is that if we don't admit to complexity in our past, how were we going to confront it in the present? I'm thinking of the Magdalene Laundries, the Mother and Baby Homes, or our vivid memory of anti-Irish discrimination existing alongside a collective amnesia of the fact that anti-Semitism was once an official part of our immigration policy.

Is your relentless online debunking having an impact?

I think at this point I can say, after three years of labor, that it is working. This is measurable to the extent that my fact-checking has caused mainstream publications to retract articles based on bogus sources I've targeted and it will hopefully caution and encourage carefulness about this topic in others going forward.

I hear from people all the time about how useful it has been. It seems to be especially appreciated by those who use it as a go-to resource to help people who may be sharing propaganda without realizing how ahistorical, damaging, or insensitive it is.

Interdisciplinary approach to the demography of Jamaica
Michael L Deason, Antonio Salas, Simon P Newman, Vincent A Macaulay, Errol Y st A Morrison & Yannis P Pitsiladis
BMC Evolutionary Biology volume 12, Article number: 24 (2012)

Abstract
Background
The trans-Atlantic slave trade dramatically changed the demographic makeup of the New World, with varying regions of the African coast exploited differently over roughly a 400 year period. When compared to the discrete mitochondrial haplotype distribution of historically appropriate source populations, the unique distribution within a specific source population can prove insightful in estimating the contribution of each population. Here, we analyzed the first hypervariable region of mitochondrial DNA in a sample from the Caribbean island of Jamaica and compared it to aggregated populations in Africa divided according to historiographically defined segments of the continent's coastline. The results from these admixture procedures were then compared to the wealth of historic knowledge surrounding the disembarkation of Africans on the island.

Results
In line with previous findings, the matriline of Jamaica is almost entirely of West African descent. Results from the admixture analyses suggest modern Jamaicans share a closer affinity with groups from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin despite high mortality, low fecundity, and waning regional importation. The slaves from the Bight of Biafra and West-central Africa were imported in great numbers; however, the results suggest a deficit in expected maternal contribution from those regions.

Conclusions
When considering the demographic pressures imposed by chattel slavery on Jamaica during the slave era, the results seem incongruous. Ethnolinguistic and ethnographic evidence, however, may explain the apparent non-random levels of genetic perseverance. The application of genetics may prove useful in answering difficult demographic questions left by historically voiceless groups.

Background
The African Diaspora in the New World provides the unique opportunity to understand the demographic stresses imposed on those forcibly relocated during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of the estimated ten million people captured in Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries by European powers, just fewer than nine million survived the harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic [1]. Detailed historical records and accounts have been synthesized over the past 50 years, allowing for valuable demographic reconstructions of various populations by period and particular region of origin. The vast majority of Africans arriving in the British America were enslaved as plantation labourers--a result of growing economic demand in Europe for agricultural luxuries such as sugar and tobacco. By the abolition of slave importation in the British Empire in 1807, roughly 2.6 million people had been uprooted and relocated to British America [1].

The island of Jamaica was sparsely inhabited by indigenous sea faring peoples when it was established as a Spanish settlement in 1509. These peoples either fled the island or were eradicated by the time of the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655, the result of forced labour and European diseases imposed by the Spanish [2]. Due to its lack of precious metals, the Spanish sparsely populated the island and only minimally invested in light agriculture and livestock. In 1612 and 1613, the only documented African slaves arrived on the island under the Spanish crown--503 in total [1]. The English, however, were quick to establish intensive slave labour sugar plantations similar to those already proving profitable on the nearby British colony of Barbados. The economy of Jamaica diversified over time, with coffee and pimento eventually joining sugar as agricultural exports [3]. An estimated 927,000 slaves disembarked from Africa on the island between 1655 and the successful abolition of the slave trade in 1807 [1]; however, in an estimate of slave numbers made in 1808, the population only numbered 354,000. By the abolition of chattel slavery in 1834, the population dropped further to 311,070 [3]. The result of a number of demographic and health related scenarios, the obvious disparities in these values indicate an environment not conducive to reproduction with replacement in the slave population of Jamaica.

Between 1655 and 1807, captive Africans embarked from the most westerly shores of Senegambia and along the coast eastward, as far as Madagascar. These regions (Figure 1) were not represented uniformly between 1655 and 1807 in Jamaica, illustrated in Table 1. This variability resulted from a number of multifaceted economic pressures. The arrival of trade with Europe introduced a continental outlet for an already common practice; slavery was widespread in Africa largely because people were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized across the continent [4]. Highly regulatory European trading companies established forts and slave factories along the West African coast in places like the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin which increasingly led to civil unrest among participatory African nations, a consequence that led to the further enslavement of conquered groups. While most groups would sell prisoners acquired during conflicts, some populations went as far as undertaking specialized military campaigns in order to procure more slaves for the Atlantic trade [5]. Inter-African political variability also led to changes in slave exportation. The most developed areas of Africa at the time of European contact were also those most likely to be drawn into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Only the most politically unified and densely populated areas could foster the early commodity trade with Europe; when European interest turned to human cargo, these areas were most directly affected by the slave trade [6]. These more densely populated areas had the capacity to respond to the explosive increase in demand during the middle and late 18th century.

Figure 1



Invaluable to modern genealogical research, the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) is passed entirely matrilineally and accumulates mutations along the maternal line, providing a unique opportunity to explore the matriline of select groups. Once considering the relatively rapid mutation rate of mtDNA when compared to the nuclear genome, it is possible to create detailed phylogenies to explore the matrilineal relatedness of people [7]. Grouping particular haplotypes into larger monophyletic clades (haplogroups) creates easily comparable units of genealogical information; when found in other parts of the world, these haplogroups can be used as indicators of recent migration. Haplogroup frequency distributions are also sensitive to population history: the haploid nature of the mtDNA reduces effective population size and so enhances the effect of genetic drift. The African contribution to the New World matrilineal genealogies in people for recent African origin are far from homozygous [8]; each group of people has its own distinct haplogroup profile distribution shaped by not only point of embarkation and number of founders, but also gross environmental and life history constraints. Earlier mtDNA assessments of the island of Jamaica results suggest an almost entirely West African matrilineal origin to the modern Jamaican population with very few genetic inroads by either Eurasian or Asian/New World matrilines [9, 10], consistent with the historical accounts of not only a high slave importation rate, but also a very small resident European female population size [11], and the decimation of indigenous groups almost directly after contact [2].

Using historically defined geographical parameters, the distribution of mtDNA haplogroup profiles in discrete founding populations can be combined in hopes of identifying and replicating the source populations found on Jamaica during the slave trade era. This approach has been used with success in comparing great swaths of New World populations of African origin to various macro-regions in Africa, showing a concurrence with the historical literature, as well as differing contributions of African source populations in North, Central, and South America [8]. Using an expanded and more comprehensive set of source populations, a follow-up study [12] highlighting African-Americans was able to show a roughly 55% similarity in distribution of that group with modern West Africa. Recent reassessments of New World populations of African descent highlight the effect embarkation points and colonial networks had on demographic make-up [13]. Additionally, a similar approach was applied to the Noir Marron of French Guiana, showing the greatest genetic similarity with populations from the Bight of Benin, despite origins ranging from the Ivory Coast to Angola [14].

The aim of this study is to apply similar admixture modelling to the mtDNA distribution of Jamaica with an eye toward geographic sensitivity, using historical data on the coasts of origin as source populations in an attempt to investigate the genetic vestiges of population constraints present during the slave era in Jamaica. Considering the overwhelming proportion of slaves imported from the Bight of Biafra and West-central Africa just before the end of the slave trade, as well as the continuously high levels of mortality among slaves, it is hypothesized that the mtDNA haplogroup profile distribution will resemble these latter sources more closely than regions exploited earlier in the slave trade.