Ireland as the British's main source of Slaves

so I know that during the 1600s after wars the conquering English/British would make a number of Irish slaves and send them to the West Indies, so is there any way to make Ireland, not West Africa the main source of Slaves for the English/British new world colonies?
 
Sounds like an AH challenge, at best. IIRC one of the principal reasons for using African slaves in the New World was that they were used to hard labor in hot climates. The Irish, with their pale skin? Forget about it.
 

MrP

Banned
Perhaps you could manage something with the Monmouth-James II-William of Orange triangle, making it all into a long-drawn out fight with the Catholic James using Ireland as his main recruiting ground. On his defeat, the English transport the Irish as slaves to parts foreign. This really isn't my era, so I have no idea as to the plausibility of such a scenario. I'm drawing inspiration from Jeffreys.

The subsequent Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys were a series of trials of Monmouth's supporters in which 320 people were condemned to death and around 800 sentenced to be transported to the West Indies.[25]
 
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mowque

Banned
Sounds like an AH challenge, at best. IIRC one of the principal reasons for using African slaves in the New World was that they were used to hard labor in hot climates. The Irish, with their pale skin? Forget about it.

Yeah, the man has a point. Malaria is going to kill them faster then you can bring them in, no matter how heartless you are.
 
It was a political stick, just like it was in England (as MrP draws our attention to) and in Scotland as well (Cromwell got a reputation for it, but Highland chiefs made a habit of having inconvenient persons knocked over the head and "shipped"), not an economical source of slave-labour. Where's the profit for the landowner? Selling a tenant is once, bleeding him white for rent is forever.


What obviously neutral and reliable sources! :rolleyes: The latter got its James's mixed up, and of course refers to Britain as England - normally an innocent if annoying mistake, but in the context of such poisonous Anglophobia not one I'm willing to overlook. Scots, right, they love freedom?

In spite of all this transparently prejudiced tat about the Wicked English Oh Aren't They Wicked, it was something the inhabitants of these isles were all doing to one-another - not to mention the huge Scottish involvement in the African slave-trade. But who wants complicated history? Certainly, the idea that a Celt would have a Celt shipped is obvious nonsense, since Celts love freedom.

Scottish coal-miners were, until the early 19th century IIRC, essentially slaves. Turns out slavery was pretty damn common.
 
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Where's the profit for the landowner? Selling a tenant is once, bleeding him for rent is forever.

Exactly. Plus, Africa already had a thriving slave trade, thanks to indigenous and Arab slavers. You would need some event to create an economic situation favorable to slavery--famine, perhaps?
 

I know that, though they didn't stay the majority of slaves for very long, any ways why is it all the stuff on the internet on Irish slavery seems to label King James I as James II? :confused: I've seen "James II in 1625" or "James II and Charles I" on like 5 different sites about this topic....
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
so I know that during the 1600s after wars the conquering English/British would make a number of Irish slaves and send them to the West Indies, so is there any way to make Ireland, not West Africa the main source of Slaves for the English/British new world colonies?
Quite ASB. Even if the Irish were dirty Catholics, you couldn't openly enslave white Christians and send them overseas without facing the wrath of God. (of course if you didn't outright called it slavery it was okay.)
 
Exactly. Plus, Africa already had a thriving slave trade, thanks to indigenous and Arab slavers. You would need some event to create an economic situation favorable to slavery--famine, perhaps?

well I was thinking, Catholic Spain and Portugal have a corner on the African slave market, and England is just getting into slave trade, in the 1640s-1670s Indian slaves or Irish/Scottish slaves were more than Africans in English colonies(west indies), there were also indentured servants (New England and Virginia) so maybe keep England hardcore anti-Catholic, or keep the Dutch from taking over the slave trade (likely both)
 
Quite ASB. Even if the Irish were dirty Catholics, you couldn't openly enslave white Christians and send them overseas without facing the wrath of God. (of course if you didn't outright called it slavery it was okay.)

Oh, no. We tend to assume that everything before 1789 or maybe 1776 was the Ancien Regime and give to it the character fondly remembered by its defenders as it died, but the 17th century was a quite different time - a time in which the overthrow of a great European monarch met little more than a shrug. Imagine trying that trick in the 1820s.

White slavery was pretty common and, as I say, not confined to the Americas.
 
Catholics=/=Christians
at lest in the eyes of Puritans

Whereas they had a great time of it under Charles I. :p

The stereotype of the Irish would not have been what it was had they not been Catholic, but there was a lot more to it than sectarianism: English opinion held that the Irish were savages (and Lowland opinion of the Highlanders was the same). "Better English rebels than Irish ones" is not a sectarian remark, and even under Cromwell the Catholics of England and the northeast Lowlands were basically left alone if they didn't cause trouble.

It was to a large extent a "race" thing, although heavily confused with sectarianism. If you asked why the Irish were barbarians the answer might well be papery, but papery didn't make you into an Erseman.

Anyway, Covenanters got shipped by several different governments, so it's moot.
 
Catholics=/=Christians
at lest in the eyes of Puritans

But aside from Cromwell's rule, the truly Puritan societies never really ruled England/Britain.

Plus, as HunttheTroll and Mowque said, the Irish aren't exactly the best ethnic group for labor in the tropics. Pale skin is only one part of it, but the other is resistance to malaria. African populations naturally have some resistance to it, but as European expeditions into tropical jungles and the West Indies have shown for centuries, white people have a tougher time with malaria.

Now, if you wanted to establish some sort of feudal corn-growing estates in North America (and I mean the Pennsylvania-New York area), the Irish would be perfect.
 
I know but I think non-Puritans might shy away from saying they're not Christian at all.

"Puritan" is a loose term, anyway. It basically meant that you wanted to take the reformation further than Laud. As soon as he was out of the picture, the various "Puritans" were scrapping.

When people say "Puritan", though - assuming they don't consider everything more reformed than Laud to be of a piece - they generally mean the Independents like Cromwell, who held to strict Protestant ethics but considered one's relationship with God to be a purely personal matter as long as you weren't Catholic. They don't typically mean the Covenanters (the people shooting at Cromwell's lot in the Second and Third civil wars, to put it bluntly), and the Covenanters certainly didn't like the Bischope of Rome one bit.
 
But aside from Cromwell's rule, the truly Puritan societies never really ruled England/Britain.

Plus, as HunttheTroll and Mowque said, the Irish aren't exactly the best ethnic group for labor in the tropics. Pale skin is only one part of it, but the other is resistance to malaria. African populations naturally have some resistance to it, but as European expeditions into tropical jungles and the West Indies have shown for centuries, white people have a tougher time with malaria.

Now, if you wanted to establish some sort of feudal corn-growing estates in North America (and I mean the Pennsylvania-New York area), the Irish would be perfect.

given the death rates in the West Indies was at around 90% I think it a wee bit academic to talk of what race was better for it.
 
Potatoes, man, potatoes! After all, that's the only food the Irish have ever eaten, amirite?

Yes, but the purpose of setting up these massive corn and wheat plantations is to provide food for proper Englishmen. The English never ate potatoes the way the Irish did, so these colonies would exist to work the Irish to death while exporting wheat to England.

Would take a lot of land and large-volume ships to make that profitable, though. And it could cause a farmers' uprising in England when the wheat price come crashing down as a result.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
There are a simple reason why African slaves are preferable to Irish slaves beside their higher survival rate. Africans in Africa don't pay tax to the English crown, Irish in English Ireland does. To transfer most of the Irish population away from Ireland, would lower the value of Ireland, create a serious labour shortage and weaken central (read English) control of the the island.
 
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