| White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America |  | Author: Don Jordan
Publisher: New York University Press
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 8
ISBN: 0814742726
EAN: 9780814742723
ASIN: 0814742726
Publication Date: January 2007
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 Highly Informative August 9, 2008
The first time I heard about the "Indenture servants" and white slaves was in London. Some American, Jamaican and Irish friends told me about their story.
The story of whites slaves (from Britain and France) has been told earlier by scholars like Eric Williams ( "Capitalism and Slavey" and "From Colombus to Castro" and J A Rogers ( Sex and Race Vol II and III, and "Africa gift to America").
It was the first time I knew about their story in history books. Don Jordan and Michael Jordan did a great job, this book is focused on Britain white slaves and the research is deep and sound.
They bring new facts we didn't know like for example:
- Portugueses were the first to get rid o the vagrants childs in their East indies colonies.
- Britain expelled some convicts in Africa (South Africa).
- The first black slaves in the USA (1619), were in facts wars prisoners. The british bucaneers kidnapped them into some Portuguese Slave boats. At this moment Portuguese were waging a colonial war against the Congo kingdom in Africa. The AFrican prisoners were sold in the new world.
This subject concerning of whites slaves is generally hidden in European history. The French scholar Gabriel Debien said in 1951 that the white slaves traffic was the foundation of Black slavery. The capital driven from their traffic allowed the Franch trade slavers to destroy Africa.He was talking of course of the French "engages" ( French equivalent of Indentured servants)
Eric Williams said it in "Capitalism an Slavery", the kidnappers of vagrants, childs and Prostitutes in Bristol and London earned their first pounds into the Indentured servant and convicts traffic.
I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the history of slavery into the new world.
Jordan and Walsh "don't beat around the bush", white slavery is the foundation of black slavery in the new world. The last one was justified upon racial prejudice. And these white slaves were sold by the European monarchs and merchants...Williams an Rogers said it in the 1940's
They also describe the process which made the first black servants ( The first blacks in the USA were treated like indentured servants see: J A Rogers and Michael A Gomez) into perpetual slaves...
La verite finit toujours par vaincre : Truth will always win
 They forgot to mention the law June 29, 2008
It's good to see another addition to the few books on the transportation of convicts to North America. But like its predecessors, this book pretty much ignores the law. It describes all white forced servants as being slaves. In doing so, it somehow assumes that the law was a sham.
In law, there was a great gulf between indentured labourers and convicts. The latter were transported as a condition of their pardons from death sentences. As a consequence, they remained attainted until their sentences were served. Attainted persons were unable to hold property, sue in the courts or give evidence. That became a matter of great significance in New South Wales, which succeeded North America as the convict dumping ground.
In analysing indentured and convict workers as slaves, the authors blur the legal difference between them. Wittingly or otherwise, they adopt the essentially Marxist analysis of law which ended among legal historians with the publication of EP Thompson's Whigs and Hunters (1978). Until then, Marxists assumed that the law was merely a ruling class plot and that its pretensions to the rule of law were merely a mask for class preference. Famously, Thompson claimed at the end of his book that the rule of law was, without qualification, a Good Thing. At the least, it was to be taken seriously.
So for an old legal historian like me, this new book is a curious historical relic, a throwback to the age of the 60s and 70s.
Isn't it time for a North American legal historian to take the law of convicts seriously? 50000 convicts were transported to North America. In practice they may well have been treated as slaves. How did that practice meld with the law? What did the courts say when the sales of convict labour were tested, or when convicts tried to give evidence?
3 out of 5 because it tells an important story in a compelling fashion. But, my, the analysis is weak.
The Hidden and Forgotten History of White Slaves May 24, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue
Table of Contents
Introduction: In the Shadow of the Myth
Chapter 1: A Place for the Unwanted: Elizabethan adventurers dreamed of an American empire that would give them gold and glory. Others saw the New World as a dumping ground for England's unwanted poor.
Chapter 2: The Judge's Dream: A highwayman who became Lord Chief Justice planned to colonise American with criminals. He began to empty England's gaols and set a precedent.
Chapter 3: The Merchant Prince: The mastermind behind the first successful English colony in America was reputedly Britain's richest man. He kept a fledging Virginia going and paved the way for the first white slaves.
Chapter 4: Children of the City: The Virginia Company wanted youngsters to work in the tobacco fields. The burghers of London wanted rid of street children. So a bargain was struck and hundreds of children were transported.
Chapter 5: The Jagged Edge: The New World was a magnet for the poor. To get there, they had to mortgage their labour in advance. They were not to know that they had contracted into slavery and might die in bondage.
Chapter 6: `They are not Dogs': Virginia was run by planters who pushed through laws that relegated "servants" and "apprentices" to the status of livestock. Notionally they had rights but planters were literally allowed to get away with murder.
Chapter 7: The People Trade: IN the 1603s, almost 80,000 people left England for the Chesapeake, New England and the Caribbean, most of them indentured servants. A ruthless trade in people developed in which even a small investor could make money.
Chapter 8: Spirited Away: Untold numbers were kidnapped or duped onto America-bound ships and sold as servants. The "spiriting" business became as insidious and organized as the cocaine racket today. Even magistrates took a cut of the proceeds.
Chapter 9: Foreigners in Their Own Land: Ethnic and religious cleansing in Ireland became a model for Native Americans being cleared from the Chesapeake. During the Cromwell era, still more were displaced and Ireland became a major source of slaves for the New World.
Chapter 10: Dissent in the North: During the 1650s, Scotland fought shy of transporting its unwanted to any English colony. Then religious and political dissent wer made punishable by transportation to the Americas. Sometimes more died on the way than ever reached the New World.
Chapter 11: The Planter from Angola: The idea that Africans were Virginia's first slaves is revealed as a myth through the story of one who became a planter himself and went on to own whites as well as blacks.
Chapter 12: 'Barbadosed': In the 1640s, Barbados became the boom economy of the New World. The tiny island's sugar industry would outperform all its rivals in profits - and in its ruthless use of slave labour.
Chapter 13: The Grandees: A planter aristocracy emerged in the Chesapeake. Its members dealt in men, land and influence, creating dynasties that dominated America for centuries. But stories of brutality deterred would be settlers from emigrating.
Chapter 14: Bacon's Rebellion: The planters' nightmare of a combined uprising by blacks and whites came true when a charismatic young aristocrat turned an Indian war into a campaign against his own class, the English grandees. Swearing never again, the grandees set out to divide the races.
Chapter 15: Queen Anne's Golden Book: Bogus promises of free land persuaded hordes of Europeans to sel up and leave for America. They began a nightmare journey that left some so impoverished they sold their children to pay the fare. But some outfoxed their exploiters.
Chapter 16: Disunity in the Union: Scottish clansmen were sold as servants in the Americas while their chieftains were allowed a comfortable exile in France - two different fates for Jacobites after 1715. Merchants made fortunes selling clansmen in six different colonies.
Chapter 17: Lost and Found: The tide of kidnapping continued under the Hanoverians. In two famous instances, victims returned, as if from the dead, to denounce their abductors. One claimed to be heir to an earldom, kidnapped by the man who stole his birthright.
Chapter 18: 'His Majesty's Seven-Year Passengers': After 1718, England subsidised the convict trade and America was deluged with British jailbirds. Paranoia grew, with soaring crime rates and epidemic blamed on convicts. Only employers were happy: a convict servant was half the price of an African slave.
Chapter 19: The Last Hurrah: Having won their liberty in the War of Independence, Americans had no intention of allowing their country to serve as a penal colony ever again. Britain had other plans and an astonishing plot was born.
Notes 283
Select Bibliography 301
Index 313
It is significant that two journalists wrote this extremely important book. Many professional historians don't want much attention paid to white slavery for fear that it will take something away from black slavery or make whites feel less compassion for black slaves. That is foolish. People must realize that anyone could (and still can) fall into bondage under whatever name if the circumstances are right. Other books that covered similar subject matter (but received little attention) are:
1) The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue by Lawrence R. Tenzer. Shows that white slavery was present in the antebellum American South and played an important role in increasing the tensions between North and South that led to the American Civil War.
2) The Legal History of the Color Line by Frank W. Sweet. Shows that American slave status was not truly based on "race" but on maternal descent from a female slave, regardless of race or color.
3) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race by Matthew Frye Jacobs. Shows how ruling planters created anti-black racism and white supremacy in order to divide the labor force and secure the help of lower class whites in putting down slave rebellions and fighting Indians. Passing for Who You Really Are
New England Work Camps?! April 28, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book's authors take a new look at a very old subject. As you probably know by now, WHITE CARGO equates the experience of indentured servants with slaves in colonial America. While this may initially strike some people (me included) as a mere polemic, this book makes its case convincingly.
The book starts with discovery of the body of a teenaged European boy in Maryland in 2003. The remains date back to the 1600s, and he is found in a mound of trash. But who was this kid? And why was his body disposed of so unceremoniously?
Walsh and Jordan tell the story of this anonymous indentured servant, and the hundreds of thousands of others like him, from both sides of the Big Pond. The first group of them arrived in 1619, and most of them were kids swept up from the streets of London. "Society's sweepings" were shipped west and made into indentured servants.
As their stories unfold, the authors accumulate the evidence and arguments that show that both indentured servants and slaves were stripped away of virtually all civil rights and reduced to mere property. Further, the privations visited upon indentured servants (abuse, shortened lifespans, overwork) are so hair-raising, it's surprising this argument hasn't been made so convincingly long before 2008.
This book is vital, it's engaging, and it's news to me. (See also Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.)
A Work Long Overdue April 28, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The plight of millions of American slaves has been overlooked by historians for far too long. Slavery in the Americas was not limited to black Africans nor were the depredations inflicted on non-African slaves.
This well-documented, scholarly expose of white slavery is a must-read for historians and civil-rights advocates, many of whom will be surprised by how widespread this practice was. The practice of indenture was well-known, but the fact that bondage often lasted until the end of life is not. I found this work to be simultaneously heartbreaking, infuriating, and riveting in content.
My husband's sixth-great-grandmother and her son were sold on the block in Charleston, but whenever we tell this story, other people actually try to "correct" us with, "No, she was an indentured servant, not a slave." (Not true). This long-overdue work is a memorial to the nameless individuals who died in bondage as well as an expose of a practice too long forgotten and ignored by American history textbooks. Five stars.
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