These would be more described as POWs. They would normally be freed upon the signing of peace.
England Actually Enslaves the Irish
These would be more described as POWs. They would normally be freed upon the signing of peace.
I wholeheartedly agree with anybody who thinks this is insane.
This is a loaded concept, to say the least. Firstly, English? Do we mean British or English? If we are talking once colonialism and the slave trade have really got going, probably British. This is a very important distinction because Scots are considerably over-represented in the Army AND the colonial elite, meaning you are asking a Celtic people to enslave another Celtic people. Mental!
The Barbary Traders are from a completely separate culture, a long distance away, with a long-term history of enslaving people from far distances and MINIMAL contact with Ireland other-wise. This is TOTALLY different, England/UK is a very near-neighbour from the same archipelago knowingly enslaving another Christian people with whom they have a shared if tumultuous history and whose middle-class and elite speak the same language and share allegiance to the same Monarch. It's not the same scenario and it's a horrible idea to start with.
But okay, let's take this seriously. Firstly, you have to forget the enormous disquiet this would cause, not just in Catholic Europe. It's not as if the English haven't fought wars with other Protestant states in 17th and 18th centuries, ahem Anglo-Dutch Wars... Enslaving the VAST majority of the population of an island that big requires a profound level of control on a local level, an efficient central bureaucracy, a HUGE military to put down the suicidal, island-wide resistance, and probably collaborators to do it. NONE of which they have.
And here's ANOTHER question, is it ALL Irish? Or just the Catholics? Presumably, the Anglican and Presbyterian Irish would recognise that if the London Government could justify such an action, if they could enslave near-neighbours who are virtually identical in every way but faith, tongue, and perhaps economic status, they could easily turn on them too. Are the families who converted to Protestantism but are still ethnically Irish are risk? We are getting into the 'Who is a Jew?' question the Nazis wrapped themselves in knots over, who is Irish enough to be enslaved and who isn't? Does that mean you can buy your way out of it? Would neighbours be ratting out neighbours in small-town Ireland and bringing in bounties for catching Catholics in-hiding? If you have a slave people who are physically indistinguishable from the enslaving people and whose country is right next-door, then you are going to have people crossing the Irish Sea and "passing" for English to avoid a terrible fate.
To say nothing of the fact that the London Government would be enslaving a sovereign nation (which Ireland was until it's own Union in 1801) and probably relying on other Celts to do it. Hatred against Catholic people is one thing, it's alive and well today in towns and cities with Orange Order Lodges, but I somehow doubt you'd be able to find enough entirely English units willing to enslave near-neighbours. That would require a level of indoctrination I am unconvinced the relatively primitive English education system is unable teaching people that this is God's plan or whatever crap they come up with to justify it, to achieve at this point. Good luck trying to get the Curates of England preaching the enslavement of people who look just like them from their pulpits every Sunday, given the Dissenters are going to tear this to shreds, which probably means persecuting the Dissenters even harder in retaliation. The Dissenters are probably going to end up much more prevalent as they are the vanguard of the "this is insane" part of the population, it might well have HUGE implications politically, say partnering with Radicals and even relatively moderate Whigs. The issue of Black slavery helped birth the Republican party in the US, I can see a Liberal Party that was passionately anti-slavery emerge here. And my God are the Wedgwoods going to make a FORTUNE out Creamware crockery with little stereotypical Irishmen on bent knee crying "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" The sheer amount of suppression needed to suppress the emerging newspaper and pamphlet industry fired up with a cause to fight this injustice and mass surveillance of the mail service needed to enforce the enormous suppression of civil liberties needed to bring this in and make it work is enormous. I can't see anybody but the most ardent reactionary continuing to support it and I rather wonder where the support would come from to get this through Parliament in the first place. To say nothing of how it would negatively affect British economic development from the lack of migrant labour to build canals, build railways (unless some were re-routed to do that) and to work in factories and furnaces across Britain. What you are talking about is a slave economy from top to bottom based on who LOOK JUST THE SAME. Even if you did bring in Irish slaves to Britain for forced labour down deep mine-shafts and whatnot, they weren't exactly popular when they were working as free labour. Imagine what happens if miners in Glamorgan lose their jobs because the mine owner has decided that slaves are a better option? Imagine the riots, how the hell would you control those areas? How would you prevent escaped slaves when they can blend into the population and there are likely to be local people sympathetic to their plight who would help them? As much as industrial Britain was hard, the changes to this are incalculable as you are removing the contributions of Irish British people to British society basically entirely (so no Beatles for example), by removing Irish DNA from the British mix. REALLY hard to imagine that world.
Additionally, I'd be STUNNED if the Scots could rationalise that away, take religion out of the equation and what's the difference? Really? If the Irish are worthy of enslaving, why not chuck in the Highland Scots, many of whom are still Catholic, whilst you are at it? Why not take ALL the Scots, I mean we are apt to support the Stuarts, aren't we? They can come and try it and see how fast they get their asses handed to them...
Jesus what an idea!
This is a loaded concept, to say the least. Firstly, English? Do we mean British or English? If we are talking once colonialism and the slave trade have really got going, probably British. This is a very important distinction because Scots are considerably over-represented in the Army AND the colonial elite, meaning you are asking a Celtic people to enslave another Celtic people. Mental!
The Barbary Traders are from a completely separate culture, a long distance away, with a long-term history of enslaving people from far distances and MINIMAL contact with Ireland other-wise. This is TOTALLY different, England/UK is a very near-neighbour from the same archipelago knowingly enslaving another Christian people with whom they have a shared if tumultuous history and whose middle-class and elite speak the same language and share allegiance to the same Monarch. It's not the same scenario and it's a horrible idea to start with.
But okay, let's take this seriously. Firstly, you have to forget the enormous disquiet this would cause, not just in Catholic Europe. It's not as if the English haven't fought wars with other Protestant states in 17th and 18th centuries, ahem Anglo-Dutch Wars... Enslaving the VAST majority of the population of an island that big requires a profound level of control on a local level, an efficient central bureaucracy, a HUGE military to put down the suicidal, island-wide resistance, and probably collaborators to do it. NONE of which they have.
And here's ANOTHER question, is it ALL Irish? Or just the Catholics? Presumably, the Anglican and Presbyterian Irish would recognise that if the London Government could justify such an action, if they could enslave near-neighbours who are virtually identical in every way but faith, tongue, and perhaps economic status, they could easily turn on them too. Are the families who converted to Protestantism but are still ethnically Irish are risk? We are getting into the 'Who is a Jew?' question the Nazis wrapped themselves in knots over, who is Irish enough to be enslaved and who isn't? Does that mean you can buy your way out of it? Would neighbours be ratting out neighbours in small-town Ireland and bringing in bounties for catching Catholics in-hiding? If you have a slave people who are physically indistinguishable from the enslaving people and whose country is right next-door, then you are going to have people crossing the Irish Sea and "passing" for English to avoid a terrible fate.
To say nothing of the fact that the London Government would be enslaving a sovereign nation (which Ireland was until it's own Union in 1801) and probably relying on other Celts to do it. Hatred against Catholic people is one thing, it's alive and well today in towns and cities with Orange Order Lodges, but I somehow doubt you'd be able to find enough entirely English units willing to enslave near-neighbours. That would require a level of indoctrination I am unconvinced the relatively primitive English education system is unable teaching people that this is God's plan or whatever crap they come up with to justify it, to achieve at this point. Good luck trying to get the Curates of England preaching the enslavement of people who look just like them from their pulpits every Sunday, given the Dissenters are going to tear this to shreds, which probably means persecuting the Dissenters even harder in retaliation. The Dissenters are probably going to end up much more prevalent as they are the vanguard of the "this is insane" part of the population, it might well have HUGE implications politically, say partnering with Radicals and even relatively moderate Whigs. The issue of Black slavery helped birth the Republican party in the US, I can see a Liberal Party that was passionately anti-slavery emerge here. And my God are the Wedgwoods going to make a FORTUNE out Creamware crockery with little stereotypical Irishmen on bent knee crying "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" The sheer amount of suppression needed to suppress the emerging newspaper and pamphlet industry fired up with a cause to fight this injustice and mass surveillance of the mail service needed to enforce the enormous suppression of civil liberties needed to bring this in and make it work is enormous. I can't see anybody but the most ardent reactionary continuing to support it and I rather wonder where the support would come from to get this through Parliament in the first place. To say nothing of how it would negatively affect British economic development from the lack of migrant labour to build canals, build railways (unless some were re-routed to do that) and to work in factories and furnaces across Britain. What you are talking about is a slave economy from top to bottom based on who LOOK JUST THE SAME. Even if you did bring in Irish slaves to Britain for forced labour down deep mine-shafts and whatnot, they weren't exactly popular when they were working as free labour. Imagine what happens if miners in Glamorgan lose their jobs because the mine owner has decided that slaves are a better option? Imagine the riots, how the hell would you control those areas? How would you prevent escaped slaves when they can blend into the population and there are likely to be local people sympathetic to their plight who would help them? As much as industrial Britain was hard, the changes to this are incalculable as you are removing the contributions of Irish British people to British society basically entirely (so no Beatles for example), by removing Irish DNA from the British mix. REALLY hard to imagine that world.
Additionally, I'd be STUNNED if the Scots could rationalise that away, take religion out of the equation and what's the difference? Really? If the Irish are worthy of enslaving, why not chuck in the Highland Scots, many of whom are still Catholic, whilst you are at it? Why not take ALL the Scots, I mean we are apt to support the Stuarts, aren't we? They can come and try it and see how fast they get their asses handed to them...
Jesus what an idea!
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Ficboy
Banned
For the criteria of this hypothetical scenario, we define England or in this case Britain as comprising both England and Scotland. By Irish we mean Irish Catholics not counting any Protestant converts. By Britain actually enslaving the Irish they send them to the Caribbean and America (i.e. Barbados and South Carolina). Any enslavement would be based on religious and lingual lines (the British specifically English and Scottish speak the same language and are Protestants compared to the Irish who are Catholic and a good portion speak Gaelic). Plus Britain already had a substantial presence in Ireland and controlled the island as little more than a colony from 1641 until 1921 for over 220 years so they might be able to enslave every Irish Catholic and Barbadose them to the New World. Then again despite the Irish looking almost like the British they were not considered to be of the same race I mean just look at the mid 19th century to get a good idea of what many White Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought of them.
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You know, that just seems like the policy of sending the criminals to Australia. Also thats more or less guarantee mass starvation in the carribean and is more or less genocide by slower means.
As I doubt the carribean islands would be able to support such a mass influx of people. Also, in the New World, it's even more likely for the Irish to just escape.
Ficboy
Banned
That's what a hypothetical British enslavement of Irish would look like. Plus they could be distinguished by their language Irish Gaelic as opposed to British English. Only this time the Irish Catholics are chattel slaves as opposed to just mere political prisoners.
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Congratulations. Now every English, Scottish, and Welsh Catholic is now worried about being enslaved. As are Scottish Gaelic speakers. Ditto Manx Gaelic speakers. Ditto Welsh speakers. Gods know what the Scots speakers will think how they will get treated.
As NM1 said, this is recognisably an insane idea that's almost impossible to put into practice given politics and logistics. The Australian Transport was just barely doable given the numbers and circumstances.
Britain did not become Britain until the 1707 act of Union when the English Parliament and the Scottish parliament merged.
There may have been an old trade route from north Africa to Ireland.
I do not think the English regard the Irish Catholics as being Christians.
Most of the Irish middle class and elite did not share allegiance with the crown. I not sure about the common language.
Crowell sold much of the Irish population into indentured servitude. The British often had to deal with rebellions in Ireland so not much change.
I think they would be mostly people with Gaelic names (Roman Catholics) or anyone else who rebelled against the crown.
While people in Ireland may all look the same to outside most Irish people in Ireland could tell the difference.
Most of the Irish who would be sold as slaves spoke Irish.
A sovereign nation no. In theory a kingdom in personal with the crown. In practice another colony full of rebellious people who cause nothing but problems for the crown.
The Irish were despised not just because they were Catholic, but that they were defeated people who would not accept that they should be under crown control.
Cromwells parliament would not have had a problem with making the Irish into slaves. I do not think civil liberties were consider to apply to the Irish.
The labour shortage would be in Ireland and there would not be enough people to work the farms.
The need to import labour from Ireland only happened with the industrial revolution and by then the British were getting out of the slave trade.
No need to enslave the Scots in the highlands they had been sent to the new world by the highland clearances.
If the British were as principled as you say they would not have let one million starve to death in the famine of the 1840s.
I do agree it would not happen as there were not enough people in Ireland to supply the slave trade and the need for labour in Ireland.
Had it been a more practical option the English would have done it.
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And I guess that no MPs resigned in protest about government policies nor that funds were additionally raised privately to alleviate Irish suffering...
(More in the sources on that wiki)
Prove that the "English" would have done it were it practical to do so.
I get the strong impression this thread is not about discussing how possible this enslavement is, nor how it could occur, and the geopolitical reaction to it occurring, but to claim a particular narrative of English character. A stereotype that I as a working class British English native of Catholic descent take issue with.
I'd second this because whilst Cromwell sits as an outlier, the majority of abuse of the Irish came via private institutions. The government did nothing to prevent it, and in many cases made it worse, but there was no common unified policy (at least to my knowledge, I'm willing to be corrected).
The reason I say this is because do you know what is vastly easier than enslaving a people? Taking their kids, raising them as English Protestants, and essentially displacing and replacing a community with their children, something that happened in some extent in Canada, and has echoes of the Ottoman Janissary system.
Heck, that is a terrifying analogue to use. If there was going to be a state institutional approach to the OP, it would probably be to take Irish children, raise them as Protestant English zealots, and then use the most radical to police Irish communities and repeat the process. Its horrifying to think of, but it has precedent of success, use the rest to fill the ranks of a standing army for the King, or occupy and maintain the remaining monasteries as monks training the next generation.
As stated though, there wasn't really the ability to do something like that till the education system came along to replace Irish with English. Not unless we're somehow suggesting there is some benefit to this system? A cheaper army? That seems doubtful, it was possible for a Janissary scale force, but thats still a fraction of the population this would impact. Radical colonists? A holy mission might be cheaper than companies, but potentially harder to control.
TL;DR - we can create genocide-porn as much as we want, for whatever reasons - but there is no method, nor motivation for the English to do this, especially at this scale, and that is ignoring all the other impacts of such a policy as pointed out elsewhere.
For some posts this is a fair point, but I think the overall message that it just ain't gonna happen is fairly clear and the majority.
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I feel compelled to respond. I just don't believe this is scenario is remotely practical to do in real life.
I am also particularly concerned that the Irish people in all their rich complexity, have been reduced to the status of weak, facile, eternal victims of the evil English oppressors which is both extraordinary simplistic and the usual narrative of anybody with historical axes to grind. The Irish may have had terrible things done to them at various times, and yet helped perpetuate terrible wrongs on others around the world whilst serving in Queen Victoria's armies and navies. The great cities of Ireland, especially Dublin and Belfast benefited immensely from the one-sided trade-in cash crops and people that came from that. Make the Irish slaves and clean their hands. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Irishmen and women also helped liberate the world alongside their English cousins from the scourge of Nazism, Fascism and rampant Militarism whilst the Irish Free State sat back and thought only of its survival and then punished those who stepped up and did the right thing.
I have multiple identities, I am a liberal Catholic, a Lowland Scot, a Borderer, part of the Hungarian and Ukrainian Jewish diaspora and British and I have experienced Sectarianism. That requires me to be nuanced, thoughtful and critical. There are always multiple perspectives and difficult and uncomfortable truths. Throwing the potato famine around as a weapon helps no one, it DOES NOT bring the dead back to life and DOES NOT change the fact that a large part of Irish agriculture was unsustainable in the form practised in the 1840s. There were too many people living in the countryside sustained by subsistence farming that died - end of. The London administration ABSOLUTELY made it much worse than it needed to be, no dispute about that, but we also shouldn't underestimate the work done by Landowners and middle-class organisers who did recognise the problem and try to solve it. It's worth considering the weird consequence of the Highland Clearances here. The Highlands were very similar to Ireland in a lot of ways and had large Catholic populations (the current data per 2011 census, note most Catholics live around Glasgow or in the Highlands), but after the Clearances happened - where the people Cleared were NOT enslaved - there were fewer people, conducting a different, more financially sustainable form of agriculture which paid for the building of infrastructure and market towns in the Highlands and had a more active professional and Factor-class who did act for the most part quite decisively in a lot of places when the blight reached Scotland. Fewer people died. It's very likely that without the Clearances the Famine in the Highlands would have been just as bad as it was in Ireland, which is both ironic and completely whack.
My point is that NOBODY in these islands comes out looking good. The Scots are just as likely to divide on each other based on Protestant vs Catholic BS or question each other's patriotism based on how they vote. We are not innocent victims. We just have a stronger neighbour who was not necessarily magnanimous with their power when we might have wished. Your question may as well have been "why didn't the Russians enslave Georgia/Poland/Finland/whoever?" Regardless of one's views on a tone of history or politics, we are stuck together in these islands and as such much live together with some semblance of pragmatism. Constantly waving each other's sins in each other's faces doesn't help us do that or build any sort of future together as neighbours and trade partners at the very least. It is doing the exact opposite that has done nothing but power hatreds and the kind of violence that was a dreadful fact of life for anybody who was born before Good Friday 1998.
There is an also HUGE difference between a dominant culture being total arses to their less powerful neighbours (which is indisputable) and a dominant culture enslaving their less powerful neighbours who look like them in the Early Modern or Modern eras. In any period after the printing press becomes an everyday thing, for a state to remain stable, there must at least be some consent from the Governed. The British Isles have seen a multitude of rebellions based on disaffected people over the centuries. I just don't believe there would be enough active support for this to do it. Cromwell is a trope at this point. He was a religious zealot and religious zealots are not the majority of ANY population. Additionally, poor communications and the long distances involved meant that it was much harder for rational minds to apply common sense to effectively counter the propaganda put out there to justify whatever they are doing - hell, it was challenging for the Allies to counter Nazi propaganda and present a straightforward narrative to the German peoples on what was being done in their name and that was the 1940s. And of course, who wants to admit that BOTH SIDES were committing war crimes. The Catholic Irish did terrible things to the Protestant Irish and vis versa, as they have continued to do until the present day fighting and re-fighting the same wars. Rather as we could look the other way on the Red Army raping its way across Germany because Germans=Nazis.
I don't think the Churches or what minimal education system there was would go along with it blindly. I also believe that you under-estimate the processes needed for a person to enslave people who look like them. The legal framework needed to do this alone would be INCREDIBLY complex and inevitably contradictory. We are not talking about discriminating against a group because you don't like them - just as an example, it took until 2004 for the British military to legalise same-gender sexual contact. We are talking about something FAR more profound than that. There would be widespread consequences for the rule of law and all society there, basically saying all people who are Catholic are not Human. Does that just mean in Ireland or over all of His/Her Majesty's domains? Have you considered the implications for the recusant population in the UK itself? Of course not, because in this scenario Irish=victims, English=evil. Or more accurately only SOME Irish are victims because Catholics are the ones who count and ALL English are evil.
This scenario relies on treating all English people as villains and as a monolith. They are not. Not all English people even at the time were ethnically English. I would dare say the Cornish would be only too aware of their own delicate position. The Huguenot population, the English Jewish population and the Recusants in England itself would also be feeling incredibly vulnerable. Some are fools or bigots, the VAST majority are just ordinary people who usually don't think about politics, but you better believe that probably changes in this scenario. Re-read Mansfield Park, if you are familiar with the references that would have been common currency in Georgian society but are not now, Jane Austen was not subtle in her disapproval of Caribbean slavery, indeed, there is an entire tranche of post-colonial readings of that novel (there's a nice overview of the work on Wikipedia as a starter, she packed A LOT into that book). She's a Vicar's daughter who is politically consistent with her class, has family ties to France and fell in love with an Irishman. But no, she and women like her are probably motivated to sign petitions against the evil committed so close to their shores and to people who are much the same as the ordinary agricultural worker her father preaches to every day and by Wedgwood china to support the cause when she can. She'll write a straight-up political book. If you thought North and South was political, you ain't seen nothing yet when Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell puts pen to paper. Walter Scott's bibliography probably looks a lot different as well and he was Tory, his subject matter likely changes. Leading Whig ladies of the day coordinate the opposition whilst their husbands sit on Manumission Committees and attack it by legal and political means. They couldn't win the propaganda war on African slavery, they are NOT going to be more successful over Irish slavery.
Not every German a Nazi. Most were fellow travellers or sticking their heads down and getting on with life, yes, they CERTAINLY could have done A LOT more to protect their fellow men, but there was also a decent sides cadre of active anti-Nazis from a wide range of backgrounds and roles from individuals helping to protect their Jewish neighbours to Generals plotting to murder Hitler. The head of military intelligence Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is a very interesting example of a traditional conservative with views consistent for the time and the place but who saw the implications of the regime, didn't like it and decided to use the system to undermine it from the inside. He paid for this with his life, executed at the age of 58 years at Flossenburg concentration camp on the 9th April, as the Reich collapsed in on itself. I would be unsurprised if there aren't small groups of Ascendency types, with family estates or good professions who don't even up opposing the system from the inside based entirely on disagreeing with it. Let us not forget that the author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace' was a slave trader who changed his mind.
If creating this system requires a leap of logic, enforcing it and sustaining it seems impossible. But then again, I suspect logic wasn't quite the point, so hey....
I am also particularly concerned that the Irish people in all their rich complexity, have been reduced to the status of weak, facile, eternal victims of the evil English oppressors which is both extraordinary simplistic and the usual narrative of anybody with historical axes to grind. The Irish may have had terrible things done to them at various times, and yet helped perpetuate terrible wrongs on others around the world whilst serving in Queen Victoria's armies and navies. The great cities of Ireland, especially Dublin and Belfast benefited immensely from the one-sided trade-in cash crops and people that came from that. Make the Irish slaves and clean their hands. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Irishmen and women also helped liberate the world alongside their English cousins from the scourge of Nazism, Fascism and rampant Militarism whilst the Irish Free State sat back and thought only of its survival and then punished those who stepped up and did the right thing.
I have multiple identities, I am a liberal Catholic, a Lowland Scot, a Borderer, part of the Hungarian and Ukrainian Jewish diaspora and British and I have experienced Sectarianism. That requires me to be nuanced, thoughtful and critical. There are always multiple perspectives and difficult and uncomfortable truths. Throwing the potato famine around as a weapon helps no one, it DOES NOT bring the dead back to life and DOES NOT change the fact that a large part of Irish agriculture was unsustainable in the form practised in the 1840s. There were too many people living in the countryside sustained by subsistence farming that died - end of. The London administration ABSOLUTELY made it much worse than it needed to be, no dispute about that, but we also shouldn't underestimate the work done by Landowners and middle-class organisers who did recognise the problem and try to solve it. It's worth considering the weird consequence of the Highland Clearances here. The Highlands were very similar to Ireland in a lot of ways and had large Catholic populations (the current data per 2011 census, note most Catholics live around Glasgow or in the Highlands), but after the Clearances happened - where the people Cleared were NOT enslaved - there were fewer people, conducting a different, more financially sustainable form of agriculture which paid for the building of infrastructure and market towns in the Highlands and had a more active professional and Factor-class who did act for the most part quite decisively in a lot of places when the blight reached Scotland. Fewer people died. It's very likely that without the Clearances the Famine in the Highlands would have been just as bad as it was in Ireland, which is both ironic and completely whack.
My point is that NOBODY in these islands comes out looking good. The Scots are just as likely to divide on each other based on Protestant vs Catholic BS or question each other's patriotism based on how they vote. We are not innocent victims. We just have a stronger neighbour who was not necessarily magnanimous with their power when we might have wished. Your question may as well have been "why didn't the Russians enslave Georgia/Poland/Finland/whoever?" Regardless of one's views on a tone of history or politics, we are stuck together in these islands and as such much live together with some semblance of pragmatism. Constantly waving each other's sins in each other's faces doesn't help us do that or build any sort of future together as neighbours and trade partners at the very least. It is doing the exact opposite that has done nothing but power hatreds and the kind of violence that was a dreadful fact of life for anybody who was born before Good Friday 1998.
There is an also HUGE difference between a dominant culture being total arses to their less powerful neighbours (which is indisputable) and a dominant culture enslaving their less powerful neighbours who look like them in the Early Modern or Modern eras. In any period after the printing press becomes an everyday thing, for a state to remain stable, there must at least be some consent from the Governed. The British Isles have seen a multitude of rebellions based on disaffected people over the centuries. I just don't believe there would be enough active support for this to do it. Cromwell is a trope at this point. He was a religious zealot and religious zealots are not the majority of ANY population. Additionally, poor communications and the long distances involved meant that it was much harder for rational minds to apply common sense to effectively counter the propaganda put out there to justify whatever they are doing - hell, it was challenging for the Allies to counter Nazi propaganda and present a straightforward narrative to the German peoples on what was being done in their name and that was the 1940s. And of course, who wants to admit that BOTH SIDES were committing war crimes. The Catholic Irish did terrible things to the Protestant Irish and vis versa, as they have continued to do until the present day fighting and re-fighting the same wars. Rather as we could look the other way on the Red Army raping its way across Germany because Germans=Nazis.
I don't think the Churches or what minimal education system there was would go along with it blindly. I also believe that you under-estimate the processes needed for a person to enslave people who look like them. The legal framework needed to do this alone would be INCREDIBLY complex and inevitably contradictory. We are not talking about discriminating against a group because you don't like them - just as an example, it took until 2004 for the British military to legalise same-gender sexual contact. We are talking about something FAR more profound than that. There would be widespread consequences for the rule of law and all society there, basically saying all people who are Catholic are not Human. Does that just mean in Ireland or over all of His/Her Majesty's domains? Have you considered the implications for the recusant population in the UK itself? Of course not, because in this scenario Irish=victims, English=evil. Or more accurately only SOME Irish are victims because Catholics are the ones who count and ALL English are evil.
This scenario relies on treating all English people as villains and as a monolith. They are not. Not all English people even at the time were ethnically English. I would dare say the Cornish would be only too aware of their own delicate position. The Huguenot population, the English Jewish population and the Recusants in England itself would also be feeling incredibly vulnerable. Some are fools or bigots, the VAST majority are just ordinary people who usually don't think about politics, but you better believe that probably changes in this scenario. Re-read Mansfield Park, if you are familiar with the references that would have been common currency in Georgian society but are not now, Jane Austen was not subtle in her disapproval of Caribbean slavery, indeed, there is an entire tranche of post-colonial readings of that novel (there's a nice overview of the work on Wikipedia as a starter, she packed A LOT into that book). She's a Vicar's daughter who is politically consistent with her class, has family ties to France and fell in love with an Irishman. But no, she and women like her are probably motivated to sign petitions against the evil committed so close to their shores and to people who are much the same as the ordinary agricultural worker her father preaches to every day and by Wedgwood china to support the cause when she can. She'll write a straight-up political book. If you thought North and South was political, you ain't seen nothing yet when Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell puts pen to paper. Walter Scott's bibliography probably looks a lot different as well and he was Tory, his subject matter likely changes. Leading Whig ladies of the day coordinate the opposition whilst their husbands sit on Manumission Committees and attack it by legal and political means. They couldn't win the propaganda war on African slavery, they are NOT going to be more successful over Irish slavery.
Not every German a Nazi. Most were fellow travellers or sticking their heads down and getting on with life, yes, they CERTAINLY could have done A LOT more to protect their fellow men, but there was also a decent sides cadre of active anti-Nazis from a wide range of backgrounds and roles from individuals helping to protect their Jewish neighbours to Generals plotting to murder Hitler. The head of military intelligence Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is a very interesting example of a traditional conservative with views consistent for the time and the place but who saw the implications of the regime, didn't like it and decided to use the system to undermine it from the inside. He paid for this with his life, executed at the age of 58 years at Flossenburg concentration camp on the 9th April, as the Reich collapsed in on itself. I would be unsurprised if there aren't small groups of Ascendency types, with family estates or good professions who don't even up opposing the system from the inside based entirely on disagreeing with it. Let us not forget that the author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace' was a slave trader who changed his mind.
If creating this system requires a leap of logic, enforcing it and sustaining it seems impossible. But then again, I suspect logic wasn't quite the point, so hey....
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The British government early in the famine did provide a lot of help and saved many lives and then stopped.
I do not know how many MPs resigned about the issue. Many in Britain include Quakers and others sent food aid to Ireland as did people all over the world including money sent by the Choctaw Indians who sent money from their reservation.
The end result was they allowed in the area of 1 million Crown subjects to die of hunger in Ireland and 1 million forced to immigrate.
I not sure it is possible to prove what anyone would have done in the past.
As to the English character, that is not something I have bought into the discussion.
I not sure the English character has any to do with the issue. Britain was a conquering nation like the other major powers in Europe at the time. The conquering nations in Europe were capable of some very unpleasant actions include slavery, genocide, etc.
The conquering nations of Europe were guided by what was practical at the time and not by principle.
I have a very low opinion of governments and what they are capable of. I think the only question of character is that of governments and political elites and what they are will to do if they chose to do so.
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Ficboy
Banned
Concerning Britain or more accurately England and Scotland enslaving all of the Gaelic Catholic population of Ireland and sending them to North America and the Caribbean to work on plantations as chattel slaves let's just say that Anglo-Irish relations will be infinitely worse because of this. Oliver Cromwell would be hated a lot more for making an entire people slaves especially ones from a European nation. Racial and religious relations in America and Britain will not only be terrible but there will be a lot of hatred and Jim Crow style segregation towards Irish Catholics even after the institution ends. The definition of white will likely include Protestants with certain Catholic groups such as Irish at the bottom as "inferior whites". And let's not get into how African slavery would be affected by having another source of slave labor the Irish there would be a lot of solidarity between the two groups.
You do realise that British actively trying to alleviate suffering in Ireland is inconsistent with claiming they allowed said suffering to happen right?
Then don't assert it as a fact in a vacuum then.
The problem is that rejecting or ignoring posts showing fairly eloquently (see @NM1 and their excellent last post) that the OP is implausible and repeating that's it's something the British/English would implement, with little substance btw, comes across as attempting to impugn British/English people in general, not solely governments.
It may not be intended that but it's how it comes across.
The British did help and then they stopped. That is the point where they allowed 1 million people to die.
I never asserted what the British would do as a fact. Speculating on what any group would do in history can never be a fact.
I agree the OP is implausible for all sorts of practical reasons. The only disagreement is what those practical reasons were.
What I said was it was something the British would do if practical. As it was never practical the issue never happened.
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Oh God this is could get VERY unpleasant! I have just edited this because I misread the bottom of the last post and wanted to change things.
Isn't it sad that we are now living in a world where one group of islands in the North Atlantic cannot contemplate their own shared history without an ever-present risk we must work hard to guard against, of intentionally or other-wise, throwing mud at each other and about 15 million people blaming the rest for all of their problems without taking any share of responsibility for themselves? I am very realistic about the impact my country has had on others, the good and the bad. I can feel an intense dislike for Empire and yet satisfaction that the Commonwealth and its positive agenda of cultural exchange, democratisation, and trade which came out of decolonisation and the unfinished, ongoing project therein. I can both be upset about our tendency to invade other people's countries in history and also take pride in our willingness to fight to defend democracy in the modern age. I can be Scottish and British and not be reduced to being a victim because at least one of the core benefits of the UK is a conscious effort to overcome that crap and work together for something better. It is possible to do both whilst being nuanced and intelligent whilst looking at things which does not please me or which even cause me shame. I cannot abide the all too easy and very lazy trend of re-writing of history to bash people over the head with how s**t their ancestors for whatever reason as if anybody's ancestors come out looking good. It does not help anybody, it offends people and it causes more problems than it solves, not to mention the old adage about being doomed to repeat mistakes if we forget about them.
Had the original post been "what if they used indentured servitude much more extensively?" or something about serfdom or the Ascendency, we'd absolutely be cooking. Those are potentially really interesting subjects to explore that can't be as easily be reduced to the most obvious and easy tropes or reduced, intentionally or other-wise to, English/British people=bad, other people=good and let's pretend the Irish weren't legally British for over a century and therefore just as culpable for anything that may or may not have happened in that timeframe as the rest of the country.
My initial response submitted the premise, that of English/British people enslaving the Irish to rational consideration. I found that I could not ignore how easy it was to be incredibly reductive about it and even though British history has never been a barrel of laughs for basically anybody, at least not until relatively recently, to outline why I thought the premise seemed inconceivable to me. which I sincerely doubted they could actually make such a thing happen without something pretty enormous changing and then challenge people to think through what a nightmare that would be if it had actually happened, in-short nothing less than the abandonment of rule of law and civil liberties for the entirety of the UK, whilst considering how hard this would be to execute and how impossible it would be to maintain for a long period whilst also reflecting that it would have some fairly enormous consequences in British popular culture - no Beatles would be a massive loss to world musical culture. I took the premise seriously and that led me to question why that exact premise was chosen in the first place. Now, I fear we might be trapped in a logic loop from whence we cannot escape. It's possible that there may be several different interpretations of what was actually intended in the original premise. In that case, perhaps the precise wording of the initial post ought to be reconsidered? It can be read negatively. I hope I have successfully outlined in both posts what an absolute nightmare this would be regardless.
Shall we start again with indentured servitude/serfdom/Ascendency as the preferred options? I am offering a fresh start, a chance to begin again without the rabbit-hole this thread risks disappearing into. Seems reasonable to me to take it and we can shake hands and all be civil and then potentially have a really interesting discussion rather than a live-action case-study in the perils of online discussion. I am also open to other ideas about areas of discussion, for example, how might the Irish Confederate Wars have been avoided/ended differently etc?
Isn't it sad that we are now living in a world where one group of islands in the North Atlantic cannot contemplate their own shared history without an ever-present risk we must work hard to guard against, of intentionally or other-wise, throwing mud at each other and about 15 million people blaming the rest for all of their problems without taking any share of responsibility for themselves? I am very realistic about the impact my country has had on others, the good and the bad. I can feel an intense dislike for Empire and yet satisfaction that the Commonwealth and its positive agenda of cultural exchange, democratisation, and trade which came out of decolonisation and the unfinished, ongoing project therein. I can both be upset about our tendency to invade other people's countries in history and also take pride in our willingness to fight to defend democracy in the modern age. I can be Scottish and British and not be reduced to being a victim because at least one of the core benefits of the UK is a conscious effort to overcome that crap and work together for something better. It is possible to do both whilst being nuanced and intelligent whilst looking at things which does not please me or which even cause me shame. I cannot abide the all too easy and very lazy trend of re-writing of history to bash people over the head with how s**t their ancestors for whatever reason as if anybody's ancestors come out looking good. It does not help anybody, it offends people and it causes more problems than it solves, not to mention the old adage about being doomed to repeat mistakes if we forget about them.
Had the original post been "what if they used indentured servitude much more extensively?" or something about serfdom or the Ascendency, we'd absolutely be cooking. Those are potentially really interesting subjects to explore that can't be as easily be reduced to the most obvious and easy tropes or reduced, intentionally or other-wise to, English/British people=bad, other people=good and let's pretend the Irish weren't legally British for over a century and therefore just as culpable for anything that may or may not have happened in that timeframe as the rest of the country.
My initial response submitted the premise, that of English/British people enslaving the Irish to rational consideration. I found that I could not ignore how easy it was to be incredibly reductive about it and even though British history has never been a barrel of laughs for basically anybody, at least not until relatively recently, to outline why I thought the premise seemed inconceivable to me. which I sincerely doubted they could actually make such a thing happen without something pretty enormous changing and then challenge people to think through what a nightmare that would be if it had actually happened, in-short nothing less than the abandonment of rule of law and civil liberties for the entirety of the UK, whilst considering how hard this would be to execute and how impossible it would be to maintain for a long period whilst also reflecting that it would have some fairly enormous consequences in British popular culture - no Beatles would be a massive loss to world musical culture. I took the premise seriously and that led me to question why that exact premise was chosen in the first place. Now, I fear we might be trapped in a logic loop from whence we cannot escape. It's possible that there may be several different interpretations of what was actually intended in the original premise. In that case, perhaps the precise wording of the initial post ought to be reconsidered? It can be read negatively. I hope I have successfully outlined in both posts what an absolute nightmare this would be regardless.
Shall we start again with indentured servitude/serfdom/Ascendency as the preferred options? I am offering a fresh start, a chance to begin again without the rabbit-hole this thread risks disappearing into. Seems reasonable to me to take it and we can shake hands and all be civil and then potentially have a really interesting discussion rather than a live-action case-study in the perils of online discussion. I am also open to other ideas about areas of discussion, for example, how might the Irish Confederate Wars have been avoided/ended differently etc?
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Sounds good to me as long as there are no more accusations of the nonIrish British collectively deliberately allowing the Irish British to die and things of that immoral ilk.
How do we get an increase in indenturing etc?
Belfast and I have exchanged private messages. I await their response @The Professor, I have suggested we have a think about how we approach refining this into something with less potential for yikes! moments. I have also pitched potentially devising a 'how do we create something with a happier outcome?' thread which I think would be a nice change of pace.
Tone online is such a delicate thing to master. It's possible there were a bunch of people interpreting the initial question in two completely opposite was which then went a bit wonky very quickly and I look forward to seeing what comes of it.
Tone online is such a delicate thing to master. It's possible there were a bunch of people interpreting the initial question in two completely opposite was which then went a bit wonky very quickly and I look forward to seeing what comes of it.
Hopefully this hasn’t been said already, but I would like to add that Christians never really enslaved Christians. I mean, obviously enslaved Africans and indigenous Americans and their descendants were or became Christian, but they weren’t Christian when they entered into slavery as a group.