Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Irish indentured servants were a significant portion of the population throughout the period when white servants were used for plantation labor in Barbados, and while a "steady stream" of Irish servants entered the Barbados throughout the seventeenth century, Cromwellian efforts to pacify Ireland created a "veritable tidal wave" of Irish ...
However, this conflation of Irish indentured servants with African chattel slaves, known as the Irish slaves myth, is incorrect and ahistorical. Chattel slavery was a different legal category based on race as codified in The Barbados Slave Code, did not cease after a period of time (usually 7 years for indentured servitude), and stripped those ...
Indentured servitude of Irish and other European peoples occurred in seventeenth-century Barbados, and was fundamentally different from enslavement: an enslaved African's body was owned, as were the bodies of their children, while the labour of indentured servants was under contractual ownership of another person.
In the 18th and early 19th century, numerous Europeans, mostly from outside the British Isles, traveled to the colonies as redemptioners, a particularly harsh form of indenture. [25] Indentured servants were a separate category from bound apprentices. The latter were American-born children, usually orphans or from an impoverished family who ...
Many of the Redlegs' ancestors were transported by Oliver Cromwell after his conquest of Ireland. [5] Others had originally arrived on Barbados in the early to mid-17th century as indentured servants, to work on the sugar plantations. [3] [6] Small groups of Germans and Portuguese prisoners of war were also imported as plantation labourers. [7]
By the late 17th century, some 10 percent of Jamaica's landowners were of Irish extraction and several, such as Teague Mackmarroe (Tadhg MacMorrough), who owned Irish indentured servants, attained the rank of "middling planter". Later, in the mid-eighteenth century, Presbyterian colonial settlers who were fleeing Ireland arrived in the Caribbean.
The British Establishment formally prohibited recruiting Catholics, a ban that was abolished from practice in 1771. In 1775, the Irish Establishment began recruiting both Protestant and Catholic Irish. [7] Apprentices, indentured servants, and coal miners could not enlist. Seamen were reserved for the need of the Royal Navy. [8]
The Puritan Commonwealth government saw sending indentured servants from Ireland to the Caribbean as both assisting in their conquest of the island (by removing the strongest resistance against their rule) and saving the souls of the Roman Catholic Irish servants by settling them in Protestant-dominated colonies where they would supposedly ...