Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Irish slave trade


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to indentured servitude.  MBisanz  talk 03:26, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

Irish slave trade

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There was no Irish chattel slavery in the Americas. There was indentured servitude, and there is a huge difference between the two. For starters, Irish indentured servants were people with legal rights whose services were under contract, and they could go to court if the terms if their contracts were violated; slaves were considered property, and could not give testimony in court. Irish indentured servants did not pass that status on to their children; slavery was automatically passed from mother to child. When an indentured servant's contract ended, the person typically received a "freedom package" that included land and money so they could set up a farm for themselves; slaves' terms of service lasted for as long as their master owned them, without terms and conditions and typically for as long as the slave lived. Slaves could be put up for auction or bid on and sold like cattle; indentured servants signed contracts of service and those contracts of service could sometimes change hands between employers, but the servants themselves were not property to be sold, leased, and re-sold. And so on and so forth.

The sources contained within the article detailing this "Irish slave trade" I trust about as far as I can throw them.

As AlexMC pointed out in the talk page, Rhetta Akamatsu (author of  The Irish Slaves: Slavery, indenture and Contract labor Among Irish Immigrants) is a self-designated "certified paranormal investigator," and so her credibility is a problem. As is the credibility of Michael Hoffman, the author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold Story of Enslavement of Whites in Early America; Hoffman is a Holocaust denier and a notorious conspiracy theorist, and I could make the argument it was his book that started this whole "Irish/white slave trade" nonsense back in 1993. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty is a fictional novel, and so it is beyond me why that is considered an authoritative source. Finally, the article The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves by John Martin (if such a person even exists) is hosted on globalresearch.ca, a site that is a notorious hub for conspiracy theories revolving around 9/11 and Holocaust denial.

That essentially leaves To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan and White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. These at least try to treat the issue of Irish indentured servitude in the Americas with a modicum of seriousness, but their repetitive conflations of chattel slavery and indentured servitude undermines much of their work. I submit the following article for a more in-depth rebuttal of the arguments contained in these books: http://www.academia.edu/9475964/The_Myth_of_Irish_Slaves_in_the_Colonies EricSpokane (talk) 02:53, 20 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete and try again: no agitprop on this encyclopaedia. The ugliest sections of history can be and are dealt with on Wikipedia, but without sensationalist wording and titling. Quis separabit?  11:40, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete as WP:FRINGE theory. I recently read the Jordan and Walsh book which is actually a good account by two journalists of just how bad indentured servitude could be, but even the authors admit that they are deviating from the use of "slavery" by mainstream historians. In the introduction, they note that "It invites uproar to describe as slaves any of these hapless whites ..." (p. 14) but then goes on to note: "Of course, black slavery had hideous aspects that whites did not experience ...." (p. 15) This attempt to redefine "slavery" to include indentured servitude and to contrast this with a new "black slavery" that had even more "hideous aspects" is not a usage that mainstream historians have adopted. EricSpokane deals with the other less than reliable sources above. 24.151.10.165 (talk) 15:19, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ireland-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 17:03, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 17:03, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 17:03, 20 July 2015 (UTC)


 * '''merge) to indentured servitude, using this for a section on where the servants came from. In view of the existence of books using the term "slave", the title is a potential search term, and leaving a redirect will prevent inadvertent re-creation.  Irish rebels, The Scots army defeated at the Battle of Worcester, and English criminals (follwoing comutation of a death sentence) were transported to America, where they were forced inot indentujted service for 7 years.  This is something rather different from the lifetime perpetual slavery imposed on African chattel-slaves.  Peterkingiron (talk) 17:20, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - Sources are unreliable, and reliable sources that would support such an article don't exist. Historians are very clear, and very much in agreement, that "Irish Slavery" is misnomer. Fyddlestix (talk) 17:53, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Merge (after some POV cleanup) and redir likely search strings, per Peterkingiron. It's amazing that we don't have at least an article section on Irish indentured servitude in the Americas in particular, given the role that played in Irish–American history.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  19:08, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Merge and redir likely search strings, per Peterkingiron, per SMcCandlish, there's a place for a section on this subject, and a redirect with a decent and well sourced finish will add clarity to the issue and at least provide context, deletion for the specious reasons listed above are reactionary as per  me on the talk page. Deletion as a reaction just invites further editing conflicts. There's a need for a section on this and there are plenty of articles and sources that provide a decent series of arguments. It can be shown that indentured servants in the early stages of colonization lived (if they lived) through a harrowing experience, and the Irish have to add early English ethnocentrism and bigotry to that burden, while making the easy distinction of servitude from the developing American form of chattel slavery, which was not the only form of slavery in use in the world at the time of colonization of the Americas. Robbie.johnson (talk) 20:05, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Not delete, and move to "White slave trade to America" - I was to quick when I found those sources (and did a very bad job when I first made this article in general I can see!). This does not mean that the other ones are invalid, and I think you should read about the subject before you make a decision. If we delite the sources and call it "White slave trade to America" it would be better. Because we have two credible sources on this subject. In the book the author have written about many different people being forcefully shipped off to the new world and being treated horrificly. While not chattel slavery, it were by defention slavery. Many others sold their labour, indentured servitude, for many years to sail over to the new world, they were treaten very badly by their "owners". Often black slaves and white "slaves", not chattel, rebelled against their owners together. Read more, preview of the book: https://books.google.no/books?id=KjOIEDCpxsQC&printsec=frontcover&hl=no#v=onepage&q&f=false Olehal09 (talk) 01:12, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * A "white slave trade to America" article would be deleted just as fast as this one. Faster, maybe, because the vast majority of reliable sources make it very clear that no such thing ever existed. Right now there are two sources in the article that meet even wikipedia's most basic standard for a reliable source, and that counts for very little when a huge amount of academic scholarship tells a completely different story. Fyddlestix (talk) 02:20, 25 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Fyddlestix, The Academic field on the subject is not of one mind. The American academy leans toward your position, but the American academy is at least partially compromised because American race relations are currently at such a sensitive impasse. The British, while admitting near slave conditions, also minimize most atrocities to a condition of "Yes, yes that happended in the Imperial period." The Irish national narrative is divided between the traditional oppressed / and new deconstruction movements, but like most decolonized regions and conquered peoples, freely use the words enslaved and slavery. And the Caribbean Schools actually favour a postion that Caribbean servitude and slavery had a near identical lived experience in the 17th century up until the solidification of Restoration Governance. Allowing that the original article certainly needs a complete reworking, and without even approaching the fact that there are certainly distinctions between bound servants and african slaves, the status, treatment, outlook, and lived experience of all servants in the early period of colonization is far more contentious academically than you are making it out. This is what is actually born out in the English Language discourse. Let's work tidy, shall we? Robbie.johnson (talk) 10:30, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
 * OK. Show me some contemporary, academic references that take the idea of "Irish slavery" seriously then. If the situation is as you suggest, then you should be able to cite some specific sources to back up your position.  Please do so. Fyddlestix (talk) 14:50, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
 * (This comment is only being put up to complete the debate, not change the result. I recommended merging as well) ANY of the contemporary sources worth their salt take the idea of Irish Slavery seriously. Nini Rodgers or Akensen's or Beckles' or Dunn's Sugar and Slaves, or the work from the New Americans like Jenny Shaw. The issue is not to conflate Irish experience and the Black Experience for American Political Points. Or to dignify the conflation, but the Issue is to compare and contrast and find out why the Meme or trope of the irish as slaves exists, and has existed for hundreds of years, and why it's there, why it keeps going, and why it started. Rodgers notes in her book that conquered and colonized peoples use the word slavery, or enslaved often and the Irish are no different. Akenson, notes that the Irish were just as prone to be abusers as abused, and after going after Beckles at first, saying that on Monserrat there's a "Universe of difference between servant and slave" admits pages later that the lived experience of Irish and Black unfree labour on Barbados was strikingly similar, except that the Irish eventually had an out. Beckles calls all servants with no recourse to bettering their positions proto-slaves and takes the idea of the Irish as mistreated very seriously enough to answer and show exactly what is accurate in their cultural history of oppression and what isn't. Jenny Shaw and Kirsten Block have redefined the terms in their work, Subjects without an Empire, talking about the period before the slave codes were written as Unfree and Free labour. So any scholar of note, and there are more I could quote, takes the trope very seriously, and rather than simply dismissing it, and throwing more tropes and misinformation (i.e. Servants' Children being born free, they certainly weren't supposed to have kids at all, and the kids who were born and immediately indentured until adulthood. ) at it, they deal with the root causes of the idea, and explain the reasoning behind it. So, I have done so. Hopefully to your satisfaction And as the debate is over and the page has been merged, if you need more sources or explanations so you can accurately answer questions about the topic, hit me up on the talk page. Cheers. Robbie.johnson (talk) 10:18, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * No sources deny that such a trade existed, two says it did. They just lumped the slaves with indentured servants and didn't call them what they by definiton should have been. Olehal09 (talk) 16:37, 26 July 2015 (UTC)


 * DELETE a per WP:FRINGE. There was no trade in Irish slaves to the Americas.  There was Indentured servant.  These two things are not the same.  Calling indentured servitude "slavery" is a way to push a POV.  Not encyclopedic.E.M.Gregory (talk) 18:20, 27 July 2015 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.