internet: Irish slaves myth

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

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 leas…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 88

Cruising for Slaves and Boating up Rivers. At sea, disease was a common adversary to both slave traders and anti–slave trade officers in the various navies involved in the implementation of abolition policies in the Atlantic. Their many challenges are covered in the pages of this chapter, placing special emphasis on the ways in which they dealt with potential epidemics whenever they seized a vessel full of sick enslaved Africans. Other important issues discussed here are the ways in which they interacted among themselves and with coastal enclaves, and also how they often engaged in proto-colonial operations while carrying out their abolitionist work.

Evidence: 45 • authority: 88

“We want no slave lecturing here”: The Irish Critique of Abolitionism. This chapter locates the origins of Irish-American opposition to antislavery in famine-era Ireland, where Irish nationalists developed a distinctively Irish critique of abolitionism. From 1840 to 1845, abolitionists in the Hibernian Anti Slavery Society (HASS) attempted to recruit Irish men and women into the transatlantic antislavery movement. Simultaneously, the Irish politician and nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell called for the Irish in the United States to support abolitionism. But O’Connell’s threats to reject the support of proslavery Americans for Irish independence coupled with HASS members’ qualms over recei…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Slavery in Britain existed even before the Roman period from AD 43 to AD 410, and the practice endured in various forms in the English overseas possessions and much of the British Empire until the 19th century. English merchants, especially from the ports of Liverpool, London, and Bristol, controlled a significant part of the Transatlantic slave trade, until the Slave Trade Act 1807 prohibited the Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire. After the act was passed, Britain interdicted the international transatlantic slave trade both diplomatically and with the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, established in 1808. After the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Royal Navy had the shi…