03: White Slavery

This is the third chapter of How to Dismantle an Empire, in the first section called Pieces of Slave. In the first two chapters I showed that we can’t vote our way out or tax our way out of this problem—democracy and taxation were both designed to co-opt the masses. In this chapter, I jump to the 1600’s and show why reparations for slavery won’t get us out: they would include nearly all of us.

I wrote this chapter before seeing the a 3-hr documentary on The 13 Sugar Colonies, which I found from Julius Skoolafish’s Book Mentions (although the YT link has been taken down, Julius has another link in his). It still has under 8000 views. It is a critical and meticulously documented history, mostly told by black scholars. Here’s the missing YT description with links:

This is a story of a rather unknown history of Zionism. Before the theft & colonization of Palestine, there was the colonization of 13 sugar colonies in the Americas & Caribbean which brought about the sugar & slave trade and the birth of globalized capitalism. Join educational discussions by legit scholars and historians, both Black & Jewish professors who have discussed the 13 Sugar Colonies and the impact they played on the Black Holocaust. No matter how much they want to hide the history, there is no longer any debate. The evidence is overwhelming. The lies have been deconstructed.. you can access my video on my dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/53ekg3ljzf8... Here is an audio file if you just want to download & listen to it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxue0tafikh... Feel free to download it or upload it elsewhere, I need no credit. The critical history told to us through Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Dr. Tony Martin, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Khalid Muhammad, Dr. Leonard E. Barrett Sr., Minister Louis Farrakhan, Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur, Dr. Stanley Mirvis, Dr. Bertram W. Korn, Rabbi Barbara Aiello, & Professor Cary Silverstein should be of public domain for the world to know about.

In this chapter, when I look at white slavery, the culprits are the same. The same money powers owned the kings and queens, financed the slave ships, hired the slave traders, financed conquistadors. Christopher Columbus was Sephardic.

The City of London is the one square mile housing the global FIRE economy of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Both it and Israel are owned by Rothschild. The Pope kisses Rothschild’s ring and DC kisses Rothschild’s ass. Perhaps Rothschild answers to the Doge, the Venetian Black Nobility, the same name as Trump’s new department and Elon’s cryptocoin.

The term crypto meant a secret Sephardi in the 1600’s and 1700’s. By the end of these two centuries of white slavery, the Bank of England was established. Let’s look at how much blood built that fortune.

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Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro.
A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. 
Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. 
Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.

—ERIC WILLIAMS, CAPITALISM & SLAVERY

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies,
but let wasps and hornets break through.

—JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) 
DUBLIN SATIRIST AND POLITICAL PAMPHLETEER

The Plantocracy

A millennium after the Axial Age, the infant empires of the barbarian countries were all grown up. Tiny Portugal claimed the longest-lasting global empire, starting with the invasion of Ceuta in 1415 and ending with the ceding of East Timor in 2002. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain established the first “empire on which the sun never set” before England nabbed the dubious distinction. France ruled the second-largest empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, covering one-tenth of the world’s surface.

But the grand dominatrix emerged as Great Britain, holding its scepter over the heads of one-fifth of the world’s population on a quarter of the globe’s total landmass. Or perhaps the tiny Vatican overwhelmed them all with the Holy Roman Empire, as John Isbister indicates in Promises Not Kept:

The soldiers were followed soon after by the friars, whose sacred mission it was to salvage souls and who succeeded at the expense of wiping out whole cultures. It would be hard to say whether the soldiers or the priests were more destructive. Together, in their search for wealth, hegemony and spiritual conversion they dominated a continent, destroying millions of lives and subjecting the survivors to servitude.

The horror and devastation that European "explorers" and settlers caused in the Americas, the Caribbean, or Africa can't be overstated. Voices that tell the real stories from the perspective of the abducted and invaded are just emerging now. There is a surge in films and books—in genres from historical fiction to science fiction—that illustrate, not just the victimization, but the power of resistance. We're finally reclaiming our shared past and using it to reshape the future.

But even less known are the stories that preceded these, of what was done to the near enemy who didn't accept their place in the pyramid of capitocracy. These members of the "master race" were separated only by class. Yet their treatment shows that those who lived under the empire’s nose were no safer than those who lived under the empire’s thumb.

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the debt of the conquistadors

Behind every imperial monarch stood a banker, pen sharpened to a knife. The crown was a jewel-studded collar connected to a leash of debt, from which the financiers commanded their pure-bred pooch to fetch them profits and mete out punishments. If the dog's head rolled, it didn't matter, because the debts had already rolled downhill.

In one example, David Graeber informs us that the conquistadors were bound in ever-deepening obligations to the kings and queens who financed them. Always just one step ahead of their creditors, nearly all died still in debt and the gold and silver they plundered passed through royal hands on its way to financiers in Genoa, Florence, and Naples. The atrocities committed and treasures amassed were never enough to satisfy the backers who financed both the wars and the explorations of the indebted crown.

The creation of the Bank of England in 1694 formalized that relationship. Rather than currency representing debts owed to the king, the circulating banknotes represented debt owed by the king to the forty London and Edinburgh merchants who financed William III’s war against France. Merchants became the power behind the throne. Graeber writes:

Almost all the bubbles of the eighteenth century involved some fantastic scheme to use the proceeds of colonial ventures to pay for European wars. Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.

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kid-nabbing for fun and profit

In The Culture of Make-Believe, Derrick Jensen writes:

At the request of the Virginia Company, a [British] bill passed in 1618 permitted the capture of children of eight years or older to be transported as slaves to America where the boys were to be owned by the company for up to sixteen years, the girls up to fourteen. Officials were paid a bounty by the company for each kid they nabbed, and judges received up to 50 percent of the profits from the sale of children, so constables roamed the streets looking for children while aldermen entered the homes of the poor to look for more. ... In the colonies, mortality rates for these children often reached 90 to 95 percent within five years. ... Between 1609 and the early 1800s, as many as two-thirds of the white colonists are estimated to have been forced to come over as slaves...

For indentured teenagers, mortality was also high—in some colonies, a third to half of indentured teenagers didn’t live to see their freedom while in others, up to 80% died in their first year. In addition to children, Jensen elaborates, “Hundreds of thousands of political dissidents were enslaved by the British Crown and transported to the colonies.” This had the double benefit of eliminating the troublemakers in the near-territories and providing labor to the plantation colonies.

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one-tenth a slave

For the planters, indentured servants were preferable to chattel slavery because buyers paid only for the passage and not the slave. At £3-£5 per head, payable to the mercantile companies, servants were a fraction of the cost of African slaves, who sold for £50. Servants were also less likely to rebel—convicts could still be hanged and those who had been tricked or had chosen to come over would blame themselves.

One technicality remained: Christians couldn’t permanently enslave other Christians. This was gotten around by the device that the ship passage itself created the bond of seven years debt servitude even if the person had been abducted. And when they’d completed payment of the seven-year bond, they were owed one hundred acres as recompense for their labor. This created a reverse incentive for keeping them alive until their release. In the seminal 1944 study, Capitalism & Slavery, Eric Williams writes:

The hope has been expressed that the servants were spared the lash so liberally bestowed upon their Negro comrades. They had no such good fortune. Since they were bound for a limited period, the planter had less interest in their welfare than in that of the Negroes who were perpetual servants and therefore ‘the most useful appurtenances’ of a plantation.

Peter Beresford Ellis confirms this point in Hell or Connaught by quoting an escaped slave:

[T]he toil imposed upon them [is] much harder than what they enjoined the Negroes, their slaves, for these they endeavor to preserve, being their perpetual bondsmen, but these white servants they care not whether they live or die...

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300 ways to die or wish you had

Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia granted fifty acres per head to those who transported a “servant” from Europe. Therefore a person of moderate means could pay for both his own passage and four two-by-six-foot berths for four servants. When he arrived, two servants could be traded for a hundred acres, which could then be farmed using the other two.

Williams found that white indentured servants constituted half of all English immigrants during the colonial period. Convicts were a reliable stream, since there were three hundred crimes punishable by death under feudal English law. They included pickpocketing more than a shilling or poaching a rabbit on a gentleman’s estate. But, conveniently for the colonies, “transportation” could be substituted for hanging. Transportation was also the penalty for trade-union activity, for Quakers refusing three times to take an oath, for formalizing marriage vows in secret, or for persons assembling in groups of five or more under the pretense of religion.

The book White Cargo by Don Jordon and Michael Walsh reports on the beginnings of Irish enslavement when King James II sent 30,000 political prisoners to the New World. His 1625 proclamation required that all Irish political prisoners henceforth be sold to English settlers in the West Indies. They ended up supplying the majority of labor to Antigua and Montserrat.

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barbadosed for their owne goode

After the Siege of Drogheda in 1649 the bleeding of Ireland began in earnest. In 1655 Lord Cromwell was asked by the Virginia Company of London to send 1000 Irish wenches to Virginia. He replied:

Concerning the younge women, although we must use force in takinge them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode, and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not the least doubted, that you may have such a number of them as you shall think fitt to make uppon this account.

Lord Cromwell, generous to a fault, added that 1500 to 2000 Irish boys aged twelve to fourteen could also be captured and sent.

In a single decade from 1641 to 1652 the British killed over 500,000 Irish, who were either rebels or mere bystanders, and sold 300,000 as slaves. The population dropped from 1.5 million people to 600,000, leaving mostly homeless women and children. During the 1650's over 100,000 children between 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and shipped to the West Indies, Virginia, and New England. Over 82,000 more women and children were transported to Barbados and wherever else the empire needed cheap labor. The verb “to barbadoes” a person even entered the language as English slang.

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confessions of a celtic cargo

Fiction that reimagines actual events can give voice and character to the losers in a history written by the winners. In Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl, Kate McCafferty tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl snatched off the street in Galway and shipped to Barbados. With vivid and poignant detail, she follows her character from being a young house servant, dandled by the master and resented by the mistress, to being sold off to another slave owner as a field hand after she betrays a slave revolt.

Lacing together factual accounts and dramatization, McCafferty shows the young girl growing up quickly, laboring in the blistering sun, and fending for herself after the other slaves cast her out as a traitor. At maturity she’s mated with a Muslim African man, as was policy in Barbados for Irish women through the interbreeding program. But this turned out to be her turning point.

Finding strength in community, the Africans and Irish unite in an Islamic jihad, which redeems her even though it ends in failure and torture. As a bondswoman, she is eventually freed but her half-African children, separated from her at birth, remain slaves for life. As a mother, there is little freedom in having her children still bound.

In the preface, McCafferty states her reasons for writing the book:

History has proven that the Irish were not docile bondsmen, whether at home or abroad. The novel which follows is the story of a fictional Irishwoman trepanned to the island of Barbados in the year 1650 and sold into bondage; and of her imagined participation in one of the historically verifiable plans, undertaken jointly between Irish and African slaves, to overthrow the plantocracy of the island. The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism. It is also important because involuntary indentured servants ‘laid the foundation for African chattel slavery in Barbados.’ But perhaps it is most important, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as part of a little-known history of affiliation, across race and ethnicity, between groups conventionally defined as incompatible.

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depopulating the kingdom

For decades after, the deportation of lower-class English and Irish continued unabated. But then one day the royalty had a sudden and uncharacteristic awakening of conscience. A wealthy nobleman strolled into a court where the judge was sentencing the unfortunate masses and, in a burst of moral rectitude, upbraided the magistrate and put him in the dock for the crime of corruption. Across the country the unspoken permission was abruptly rescinded, and the chain of bribery broken. While history celebrates this reversal as a rare instance of the powerful defending the helpless, Williams has put forward a more pernicious explanation for Britain’s change of heart:

By the end of the seventeenth century the stress had shifted from the accumulation of the precious metals as the aim of national economic policy to the development of industry within the country, the promotion of employment and the encouragement of exports. The mercantilists argued that the best way to reduce costs, and thereby compete with other countries, was to pay low wages, which a large population tended to ensure.

He quotes Sir Josiah Child that “whatever tends to the depopulating of a kingdom tends to the impoverishment of it.” Child’s concern was not for families torn apart and children sold into servitude but for the loss of domestic workers. England, in other words, had decided to indenture its servants at home rather than outsourcing their lower classes.

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the hopeful legacy of gingers

In White Cargo the authors object to reserving the term slavery exclusively for those of African heritage:

It invites uproar to describe as slaves any of these hapless whites who were abused, beaten, and sometimes killed by their masters or their masters’ overseers. To do so is thought to detract from the enormity of black suffering after racial slavery developed. However, black slavery emerged out of white servitude and was based upon it ...

The indentured-servant system evolved into slavery because of the economic goals of early colonists: it was designed not so much to help would-be migrants get to America and the Caribbean as to provide a cheap and compliant workforce for the cash-crop industry. Once this was established, to keep the workforce in check it became necessary to create legal sanctions that included violence and physical restraint. This is what led to slavery: first for whites, then for blacks.

What the aftermath of white slavery demonstrates is actually very hopeful: in the US at least, there's no lasting bias against people with red hair and freckles. The brutality exhibited by the masters of indentured servants—and surely there were exceptions who treated them with decency—went against human nature. When the economic circumstances changed, so did the prejudice. Likewise, my hope is that racism was and is a response to an adversarial relationship imposed through economics, not human nature.

Rather than dividing people into conquered and conquering, my purpose is to look at the ways in which the system makes everyone both victim and aggressor, slave and master, innocent bystander and collaborator. A holistic approach looks at people as the products of their environments, and sees the economy as the primary driver of the environment. Instead of apportioning blame and guilt by defining racism as cause, not effect, an organic remedy heals the ground in which racism grows. Divided we fall, together we can change the system.

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CHAPTER 3 EXERCISES

Paradigm Shift #3

Slavery subjugated whites before it subjugated blacks. Slavery was not about race but about economics. Racism was a result of slavery, slavery was not a result of racism. Slavery chews up land and spits out people: white, black, brown, yellow, red.

LEXICON

Explain what the modern parallel might be for the following terms or concepts. Do any of these deeper definitions change your perspective on social problems?

conquistadors: heavily indebted entrepreneurs whose primary obligation was to repay the investors with speculative profits.

financiers: merchant-bankers who provided the circulating banknotes that paid for the king's conquest. Imposing more debt than the financier had gold, the notes circulated for internal commerce, enabling the borrower to buy labor and goods, and the workers to buy a share in the products of conquest or colonization.

to barbadoes: to ship a person off to a labor colony, never to return.

indentured servant: a lower-cost slave with a limited tenure and payment at the end of the term, reducing the incentive to take care of them even to the point of keeping them alive.

hereditary slavery: legal and permanent ownership of a person and all of their future descendants, forbidden by the Church for white Christians.

plantocracy: the economy of a plantation—with the financiers at the top over the masters, whose overseers did the dirty work of controlling the field slaves and indentured servants through bondage and torture. Parallel to the plantations were the professionals and businesses who had access to the cheap products of slavery with none of the risk, similar to the consumer market today.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

As the Holy Roman Empire, Christianity has done much harm in its 2000 year history, between the Crusades, the Inquisition, colonization, the subjugation of women, the condemnation of gays, and the suppression of free thought. Did Christianity change when it became an empire? Does the Gnostic definition of archons as "earthly lords who had usurped the power of God" apply to other hierarchies?

Were you aware of the extent of white slavery in the 1600's and 1700's? Why might this be absent in our history books? If you had been Irish or Scottish, and had to choose between the quick death of a rebel or abject servitude, which would it be? How do countries that rebel against imperialism get dealt with today?

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"Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians--those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey." Aristotle

I read Chapter One of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. I describe the origins of democracy in ancient Greece as a shrewd move by the archons to quell rebellion. Greek democracy was a pretty word laid over systemic violence. When debt and slavery had reached a boiling point and commoners threatened to unite, this was a concession that divided farmers against the landless, soldiers against the colonized, and citizens against the enslaved.

I read Ch 2 of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, on the origin of money. Citing David Graeber's Debt, I look at the military-coinage-slavery complex and the myth of barter. I explain the gift economy that preceded money, in which relationships were valued above a bargain/ barter-gain. Religions of altruism are seen as a reaction to market-based greed. I conclude that money, from its inception, was trade in pieces of slave and that coinage coopted us into being shareholders in conquest.