Audiobook11 hours
White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America
Written by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
Narrated by Roger Clark
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain's American colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually 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.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually 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.
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Reviews for White Cargo
Rating: 3.565217347826087 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
46 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed listening to this. Taught me a lot of new history.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Until I started reading [White Cargo] by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh I thought I knew a little something about American history. I didn’t. Between Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence, American style slavery was developed to supply the labor needed to work the new land. First street children, then convicts and undesirables like the Irish were being gathered and shipped to America. Some volunteered to work off the price of their passage for the opportunity they were told awaited them in the colonies. All found themselves in a slave trade that was so profitable that soon people were being kidnapped off the streets to fill the demand for labor in the New World. The authors make a good case for their argument that ‘indentured service’ is just another name for slavery. As they point out, African servants were originally treated no differently from English servants. The story of Anthony Johnson, an African who worked out his indenture and went on to build his own plantation and own his own servants, both black and white, is illuminating to say the least. The book gave the best picture I have yet seen on the development of the institution of slavery and racial intolerance in America that I have seen. The book is well researched and documented, their extensive bibliography offers a bounty for anyone wanting to do further investigation. Each chapter is well organized around specific aspects of the selling of other peoples labor and has the narrative flow of a novel while not venturing into speculation. The use of the phrase ‘played the race card’ struck me as anachronistic but the actions they describe planters taking after Bacon’s Rebellion certainly seem to fit our understanding of the term.I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of the United States and the people that built it and I am looking forward to Jordan and Walsh’s next effort.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Disjointed, overblown, and poorly sourced. Skip it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For most of the 1600's, the bulk of American slaves were white "indentured servants." Many of them came to the colonies involuntarily. While their servitude wasn't for a lifetime like black slaves' was, many many people died before they earned their freedom. For example: of the 300 children kidnapped and brought to America between 1619 and 1622, only 12 were alive in 1624. It was vicious. This book is about those people and what happened to them. the authors offer tales from diaries and personal accounts as well as evidence from legal records and publications. It was an interesting book. I liked it, depressing though it was.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tells the forgotten story of America's white slaves, where English undesirables were simply sold to slave owners in the Americas. It is a timely reminder that not all the slaves were black.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It'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.