Since this was OT in another thread I decided to bring it here. Anyway this were we left off.
Ok this looks sidetracking to me and this isn't the point. The issue here isn't WHY did the Irish take part in colonisation and the slave trade the point is wether they did or not.
Are you serioulsy trying to bullshit us into believing that the only people involved in slavery were Anglo-Irish? I suppose all those troops were anglo-Irish as well. As my quotes says there were Irish men from all classes and backgrounds.
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Last edited by Deadline on Jan 20th, 2010 at 02:47 PM
When this happened, Ireland belonged to England. It had no independent government of it's own.
It even says in WHAT YOU QUOTED that it was the British Army that drafted/recruited these people.
Anglo Irish were the only people rich enough to own slaves, because everyone else was too poor to actually afford slaves.
The british brought slaves to ireland. it was sympathising b*stards that got the slaves, and they were the anglo irish because they had ties to britain, and therefore were looked upon kindly by their british rulers.
Just for anyone who doesn't know:
the irish language was made ILLEGAL in ireland by the british occupying forces, and to this day is primarily a dead language because of it.
Irish customs, our traditions, even OUR SPORTS, were either banned outright or ended up like the massacre at Croke Park
So you're honestly going to claim that while we couldn't speak irish, practice our traditions or live free from british rule, we were allowed to own slaves? SERIOUSLY?
Irish troops in the British army were not forcibly recruited; there was no conscription. They were all volunteers and there was always this interesting area of Irish volunteers fighting for a nation that was technically occpuying their country. Other than the fact that the typical person needs a bed at night and the British army was a way to get that, they very often fought against the French out of simple national pride. The Connaught Rangers are a fascinating unit to study.
It is also deeply simplisitc to imply that all rich or powerful Irishmen were somehow the responsibility of the British- that is obvious nonsense. Belfast came entirely to prominence on the back of the slave trade based on entitely internal Irish mercantalism, after the British allowed free trade there.
Pr, simply no-one is going to believe you when you say something so outrageous. Blaming the whole thing on the British is... poor. Irish businessmen were in on the slave trade. They were not forced to do so by the British; the only thing that had stoppped them was the British not allowing Irish trade. As soon as that was relaxed, they were in. If you are going to say that a few Irish businessmen don't make a slave trade, then ok... a few British businessmen don't make the British as a whole into slavers either on that logic. The fact of the matter is that the concept of slavery in Ireland massively predates the British- like nearly all of Europe, the culture of slavery was there from the very beginning, and was not disrupted until the mass acceptance of Christianity.
It is simply wrong to deny that the Irish had a noticable slave trade involvement. Not to mention that early Irish immigrants to the Americas owned slaves just like eveyone else there did. Any idea of Ireland being entirely morally clear on the slavery front and all possible wrongs being at the door of the British is pathetic. Your idea of the existence of collaborators who owned slaves, but only because of the existence of the British, is also an absurd fantasy.
Ireland's involvement in the slave trade only ended when Britain compelled it. Not that the British can claim a great moral superiority, as they were still making a ton from the drugs trade (and British ports were just as complicit as Belfast in slavery).
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Last edited by Ushgarak on Jan 20th, 2010 at 03:44 PM
not what i said, and i honestly can't believe you misquoted me like that.
first of all, i said drafted/recruited, meaning both were done. both were. irish men were still voluntarily joining the british army up until, well, the present day. one of my relatives is actually part of the army.
the only irish people that had influence and power under british rule were loyalists to the queen, or wealthy landowners/businessmen (like you said) who again, worked with the british. the average irish person had neither the opportunity nor wealth required to be a slave owner. any irish person that opposed british rule (and there were a few of them) were executed pretty quickly.
did the irish make each other slaves before british rule? yes. that's not what i'm talking about here. i'm talking strictly about african slaves.
yes, irish people owned slaves. but was it an irish idea, and irish way of life, and collectively, independently an irish decision? no.
ireland was f*cked up in the past. its f*cked up now. the FACT is, though, what the british did in ireland was abhorrent, whether you want to pretend it was or not. so yes, they deserve some of the blame.
White people (by which I will mean Europeans) were just new customers. Americans didn't invent slavery, and neither did British, Spanish, Portuguese, French...
Many tribes went to war with each other to get slaves to sell them for profit. When did this become new phenomenon?
It has existed throughout human history and practised by almost every tribe, culture, civilisation, racial group and religion.
It amazes me that people, particularly in North America, just ignore the slave trades across Sahara, The Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
While European slave trade lasted just over 3 centuries, Arab-African slave trade, lasted 14 centuries (somewhere still practised).
Just in 19th Century, 1.2 million slaves were brought from Africa via Sahara to Middle East, further 450, 000 down the Red Sea, 442 000 down east African coasts. Total 2 million.
That is just in 1800.
While the tarns-Atlantic slave mortality was as high as 12.5%, the slave trade across Sahara, Red sea and East African coast was as high as 80%.
While majority of slaves in American slave trade were shipped for agricultural work, the majority of slaves shipped to Middle East were for military (slave armies) and sexual slavery.
In America 2 in 3 slaves were men, while in Middle East, 2 in 3 were women.
While in America slaves could get married and have children, in Middle East all men were castrated and children born of femals usually killed at birth.
While it is estimated that between 10 and 12 million slaves from Africa were transported to Americas, 95% went to South and Central America, mainly to Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
Right now, 20% of Saudi Arabia's populations are slaves! Origin : Sudan, Africa.
Noone denies the horrid nature of trans-Atlantic slave trade - but selective history irritates me to no end.
If you don't care about Arabs or about their enslavement of Blacks and would rather talk about terrible Europeans - you should be attacking Spaniards and Portuguese...
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if you were a merchant and you took out a loan, hired a boat and enlisted a private army equipped with the latest in weapons tech and ammunition, then sailed halfway accross the world to get slaves, would you turn back and return empty handed if the people you targeted as slaves said they were very happy you came to visit but weren't really interested in your offer.
As far as I know that reaction wasn't very common. African tribalism ran/runs very deep. They were already enslaving each other as part of the spoils of war, selling those slaves for awesome new weapons didn't take much prompting.
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Brilliant. So the Irish were involved in colonisation and the slave trade. So basically you're wrong. Instead of just admitting you're wrong you're just waffling.
I will repeat myself for the second time not interested wether the British were treating the Irish badly (not that I think it was a joke just not the point of the thread) the point of the thread was wether they were involved or not...thats IT.
You also don't need to own slaves to be involved in the slave trade. Even if the British weren't giving the Irish people a hard time they would have still got involved in the slave trade and would have tried to make Irish colonies abroad.
Nobody saying that what happened in Ireland wasn't horrible thats you just trying to put Ush on the defensive.
Y'know that kinda sounds like oversimplification as to what happened. Im not even entirely sure wether they needed guns from Europeans. Africans were part of an Islamic Empire and they could have got guns from the Arabs. I don't know that just sounds like you watched some Western on Tv and equated what happened in America as to what happened in Africa.
You do know that before things really got bad in Africa that we had an Empire traded and intermarried with Europeans and we were well known? As far as I know it wasn't like that for the American Indians or Aboriginals.
The British didn't conquer Africa because they were primitive its because of the lack of unity. If they were unified im pretty sure they could have stopped it from happening and even made the neccesary weapons themselves.
__________________ Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
- General George Patton Jr
Last edited by Deadline on Jan 21st, 2010 at 09:50 AM
maybe it is important to define "types" of slavery, or how the Atlantic trade route cemented the racist colonialism that gives the West its power today.
I get the point, whites aren't the only people to hold slaves, nor were blacks the only slaves, but there were fairly significant historical consequences to the Atlantic passage that separate it as an entity from the sort of tribal slavery that existed in Africa and most other "uncolonized" locations.
thats not quite correct. Even the Zulu empire suffered huge losses to the British, and it is certain they didn't have the technological advancement at the time of contact. The Zulu are an excellent example of asymmetric warfare, however.
Given that we're not writing academic papers anything we say will be a horrendous over simplification.
That's your mistake. The group "Africans" is not a meaningful one, even today. When European sailors found Africans that were already part of some empire they just went and found Africans that weren't part of an empire.
Who? Africans?
I pointed out the lack of unity. Tribalism is almost certainly what made the Atlantic slave trade possible.
As for the weapons they would have been useless without the proper infrastructure to produce the right sort of gunpowder.
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Jan 20th, 2010 02:37 PM
FER TEA!!
