White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 300,000 people or more became slaves there in all but name. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labour in the tobacco fields, brothels were raided to provide 'breeders' for Virginia and hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become chattels who could be bought, sold and gambled away.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and court and government archives, the authors demonstrate that the brutalities associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule.
The trade ended with American independence but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.
This is a saga of exploitation and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
High school American history classes present indentured servitude as a benignly paternalistic system whereby colonial immigrants spent a few years working off their passage and went on to better things. Not so, this impassioned history argues: the indentured servitude of whites was comparable in most respects to the slavery endured by blacks. Voluntary indentures arriving in colonial America from Britain were sold on the block, subjected to backbreaking work on plantations, poorly fed and clothed, savagely punished for any disobedience, forbidden to marry without their master's permission, and whipped and branded for running away. Nor were indentures always voluntary: tens of thousands of convicts, beggars, homeless children and other undesirable Britons were transported to America against their will. Given the hideous mortality rates, the authors argue, indentured contracts often amounted to a life sentence at hard labor some convicts asked to be hanged rather than be sent to Virginia. The authors, both television documentarians, don't attempt a systematic survey of the subject, and their episodic narrative often loses its way in colorful but extraneous digressions. Still, their expos of unfree labor in the British colonies paints an arresting portrait of early America as gulag. 8 pages of photos.
