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:

a nation built on white slavery

globalized slavery

whitewashing slavery

Britons never will be slaves?

so you think you’re a slave?

Tobacco and America's Convict Past

out of sight, out of mind

digging up your ancestors

is slavery the human condition?

the ghosts of slavery

kidnapped children

black v white slavery

Anglo Slavery

lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers

the ghosts of slavery

Mikki points out that anyone who is familiar with the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the earlier enslavement of hundreds of thousands of innocent poor people from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales -- who, before convict transportation and black slavery, were kidnapped, sold and shipped in chains to the New World colonies to be worked as slaves in perpetuity from the early 1600s to the early 1700s -- knows that poverty and overpopulation leads to slavery and gross civil abuses.

“Even those not familiar with British colonial history feel intuitively threatened by masses of immigrants coming into their country, taking their jobs, undercutting their wages, creating housing shortages and generally lowering the standard of living of ordinary people while increasing that of the rich and powerful,” says Mikki. “All of the good work done by the slave abolitionists and the Trade Unions is now being undone, and the ghosts of slavery are coming back to bite us.”

“There was never any consideration given to paying the kidnapped people for their labor or freeing them -- it was slavery for life,” says Mikki. “And the role of the Scots in the slave trade, both white and black, is particularly damning.”

“Scottish highland chiefs -- like their counterparts in Africa -- actually colluded with slavers and shippers to sell off their surplus populations,” says Mikki, “and venal justices, usurers and landlords in Edinburgh also colluded with them by using devious debt, tenancy and vagrancy schemes to more or less legalize kidnapping, shipment and perpetual slavery of innocent people in the New World.”

“It wasn’t until 1757 -- 130 years after white slavery to the New World commenced -- that a number of Aberdeen businessmen and magistrates were exposed for their involvement in the white slave trade.”

“By then, the African slave trade had become far more profitable than the white slave trade, and free white settlement was the norm after the 1776 Revolution,” says Mikki. “So, the bulk of white people being sent to the New World just before the 1776 Revolution were convicted criminals, petty or otherwise, mostly political dissidents, and they were not particularly welcomed by the plantation owners because of their bad character or attitude.”

“So popular were black slaves that the British gentry even wanted them as household servants, and when slave markets openly trading in Negro slaves actually appeared in London and Liverpool the awful reality of slavery was brought right into the heart of the nation. Slave markets were the norm the the USA, but they had not been seen in England since the Roman Empire!"

“As with immigration today, the native English population was horrified at the sight and plight of the black slaves within their midst,” says Mikki, “but mostly they resented that the gentry were buying these slaves in order to avoid paying a wage to a local person.”

“The activists expressed economic as well as moral outrage against slavery in England and the colonies,” says Mikki, “and in this sort of climate it wasn't surprising that the American Revolution of 1776 took place, separating the old and the new world.”

Read more by Mikki on this issue:

a nation built on white slavery

globalized slavery

whitewashing slavery

Britons never will be slaves?

so you think you’re a slave?

Tobacco and America's Convict Past

out of sight, out of mind

digging up your ancestors

is slavery the human condition?

kidnapped children

black v white slavery

slave migrations

Anglo Slavery

lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers

black v white slavery

Mikki claims that successive governments in Britain and America have conveniently concentrated so much on the black slave trade that very few people are even aware that there was such a thing as white slavery.

“White slavery was either not taught in schools at all or it is brushed over with the 'indentured servant' lie,” says Mikki. “This is despite white slavery in the New World being a frequent subject of parliamentary debate as early as 1656 when the selling of whites in slavery was seen as being a threat to the liberties of all Englishmen.”

“Also, in 1659 a petition to parliament described in detail the deplorable way in which white slaves were treated in slave ships,” says Mikki. “They were locked below deck amongst horses not only for two weeks or more while the ship was still in port but also for the entire voyage.”

“They were chained from their legs to their necks and cramped with 300 others,” says Mikki, “but sometimes the ship's master, for greater profit, would crowd as many as 600 into the hulks.”

“The ship’s master did not care that half of these people or more would die before reaching their destination,” says Mikki. “At that time there were no trade goods in England to send back to the colonies -- it was either empty ships or white slave ships.”

“The first slaves in the American colonies were white slaves, slaves for life, including any children they had,” says Mikki, “and the white slave trade was a far more extensive operation than the black slave trade ever was.”

“It involved hundreds of thousands of unfortunate white men, women and children stretching back to the 1600s and the kidnappings even continued well after the Revolution.”

“White slaves were worth far less than Negroes in the New World,” says Mikki. “They did not last very long in the new climate and, having paid more for a black slave, the planters treated them better than whites.”

“Even the Negroes recognized this and showed contempt for the whites worse off than themselves.”

“The wealth and status of America’s oldest families was gained entirely on the back of slaves, white and black,” says Mikki, “but primarily white slaves because they laid the foundations of the nation long before the first Negro slave stepped onto North American soil.”

“The only white settlers who prospered and left many ancestors were the slave traders and the pre-Revolution convicts and the post-Revolution indentured servants,” says Mikki. “Both the convicts and the indentured servants served their time and then took full advantage of black slave labor up to 1860, when slavery moved back to being white again.”

“Waves of poor starving white immigrants following the Irish Potato famine were worked virtually as slaves in America,” says Mikki. “So black slavery, taken into context, was merely a blip in the history of the settlement of the New World – the real burden we face is the shame of enslaving our own people.”

Read more by Mikki on this issue:

a nation built on white slavery

globalized slavery

whitewashing slavery

Britons never will be slaves?

so you think you’re a slave?

Tobacco and America's Convict Past

out of sight, out of mind

digging up your ancestors

is slavery the human condition?

the ghosts of slavery

kidnapped children

slave migrations

Anglo Slavery

lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers

what's the difference between european and american immigration?

Long before the discovery of the new worlds from 1492 onwards Europe had ceased to be a geographical area of immigration by forcible invasion or otherwise; but the American colonies were founded to take surplus populations and the new nation actively encouraged new settlers.

Naturally, there had always been a great deal of movement between populations within the European nation states, but the threat of invasion from a non-white civilization was negligible at the start of the 15th century.

The last time England had been invaded, for instance, was by the Normans in 1066 - hardly an earth shattering experience because they were close neighbors with common ideals; and the same goes for the migration of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, after the 1685 Edict of Nantes revoked their protection, and the Russian Jews after the pogroms of 1881. The French Huguenots and the Russian Jews were foreign, but they were white and as such they blended with the existing population.

It is true that there always had been a threat from the Ottoman Turks, but their incursions were restricted to the eastern boundaries of Europe and north-western Europe had been essentially safe for thousands of years. (That the EU is now in the process of admitting Moslem Turkey into its fold is an amazing turn of events!)

As most Europeans had never seen a black person before in their lives, it was a shock for them to suddenly cope with the arrival of wave after wave of non-European immigrants with legitimate citizenship rights granted as a result of post-WWII colonial independence.

America did not face this sort of problem because it had always had a black population and it has always been an immigrant nation. More importantly, because of its geographical location and strict immigration policy it had almost total control over who arrived on its shores, and absolute control over who was granted citizenship.

Americans - of whom the most prominent racial group has always been German, followed by Irish, then African-American and English - may complain about the problem of Mexicans illegally crossing the border between the two countries, but this would be like ancient Celts complaining about ancient Britons invading their territory and vice versa. It's a neighbor's dispute, not a clash of civilizations such as that being experienced in Europe with illegal migrants arriving from distant lands. When settlement in America approaches the age of settlement in Europe, Mexican migration will not be considered a problem at all.

why is racism the colonial legacy?

When the colonies matured, embracing all of the institutions and ideals of the mother nations, independence was ultimately granted - either by conflict or peaceful means - but the racism of the colonial legacy, like the guilt of slavery, is one that is still hurting today.

The new worlds in North and South America had their own unique history in that the British and Spanish colonies had to import and enslave Africans to do their work - creating a problem of what to do with these people when the abolitionist movement ended slavery.

Liberia in Africa was created by the North Americans for this purpose, but few Africans wanted to leave. Having lived in the colonies for as long as their white masters, the Africans considered themselves to be as much an American as anyone else. And quite rightly so. In this respect, the new western civilization as it developed in America is distinctly different to how it developed in other colonies.

The colonial legacy in other colonies - or dominions such as British India - was not slavery but a unique problem related to race and citizenship. Colonial independence led to dual citizenship of the mother country as well as the new nation, and once given a passport to Europe many of the formerly indigenous populations used it to their advantage and in doing so sparked racism in the white nations they migrated to.

Because of its foundation on slavery, the racism that developed in the American colonies - which is still evident today - is very different to that which developed in post-WWII Europe.

The pre-WWII European colonial governments mostly had a benevolent attitude towards native populations, and in granting former colonies or dominions independence it was probably never expected that the populations of these places would want to use their former colonial status to emigrate to the lands of their former governors.

Racism, as it developed in post-WWII Europe, was a backlash against massive immigration. Europeans were in war recovery, rationing continued for many years after the war, everything was in short supply and they did not like their jobs and housing and schools and meagre government benefits being taken over by a mass of people from former colonies - especially those people from countries which had not been touched by the war.

In Europe, there is little, if any, intrinsic hatred of non-white people as evidenced in America with a history of slavery. What is called 'racism' in Europe is similar to the hostility shown by Americans to Mexicans.

Basically, nobody likes their jobs and houses and schools and government benefits being taken over by people who have no birthright to it, and it is unfortunate that a different skin color was involved.