slave migrations
So much of ancient migration patterns was determined by the slave trade that it should not have surprised Mikki that slavery played a crucial part in later migrations, too, and continues to shape the modern world via human trafficking and sex slavery from Eastern Europe and South East Asia.“The discovery of the New World of North and South America and the need for cheap labor started a huge migration of slaves -- forcibly, of course,” says Mikki, “and while the Latin Conquistadors were plundering Africa of its peoples, shipping them off in chains and working them as slaves in South American plantations the British were plundering their own people, shipping off the surplus poor in chains and working them as slaves in North America and the West Indies.”
“This is something I did not know,” says Mikki, “and it shocked me to learn that one of my ancestors was a convicted felon who evaded execution in the Old Country by transportation and worked as a slave alongside kidnapped Negroes on the tobacco plantations of Virginia.”
“In 1701 the Calendar of Colonial State Papers records 25,000 slaves in Barbados of which 21,700 were white,” says Mikki. “There was absolutely no doubt that the white people shipped to the New World were intended to be slaves.”
“The only protests at that time were against black slavery in England because nobody knew what was happening to the whites shipped off to the colonies,” says Mikki, “and when confronted the Solicitor General of England expressed the view in 1729 that slavery of Africans was lawful in England.”
“It took until 1760 for the first organized campaign against slavery -- the Anti-Slavery Society founded by Granville Sharp -- to get up and active,” says Mikki. “Exposure of black slavery actually helped end white slavery.”
“In 1757 the Aberdeen businessmen and magistrates who were kidnapping poor white people and selling them to plantation owners in the colonies were exposed for their involvement in the white slave trade.”
“Because those running the country had more than a vested interest in perpetuating slavery,” says Mikki, “it took forty more years before any action was taken.”
“There was no universal suffrage in those days,” explains Mikki. “Only the rich and powerful had the right to vote and if you had no means of support you were fodder for the cannons of war or the plantations of the New World.”
Read more by Mikki on this issue:
Labels: America, Barbados, barbary coast, convict transportation, England, freedom, indentured servitude, Ireland, Jamestown, kidnapping, Scotland, slavery, slaves, west indies, white slavery
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