Shocked at miner’s slavery in Scotland. White Supremacy?

I didn’t know that 25Avalon sound interesting I’m going to look for it on ‘libby’

That's interesting. It just shows that the history of slavery and serfdom is far more complex than we usually think. Landowners and peasants 'tied' to the land, miners who had to buy all their equipment from the mine owner's shop, servitude in one form or another going back thousands of years.

We can't apologise for all that - 'the past is another country' - and we have no control over what our ancestors did. We should, though, be working to ensure that such unfair practices can't happen now or in the future.

Yes so true septimia especially your last sentence.

I met a Jamaican lady on a cruise, who had spent her working life in Yorkshire. Both her and her husband had been criticised by their new Jamaican neighbours for keeping their ‘slave’ names but they were actually the surnames of their Scottish ancestors who worked in Jamaica as indentured labour. History is never straightforward.

Sounds very interesting, as most of my ancestors were either farm labourers or miners in Scotland.

There are stories of Jacobite prisoners, transported to the plantations to work as slaves and when freed some became themselves slave owners.

My DH family descends from a Scottish trader and his Haitian "wife" and have done extensive research.

Humans being what they are - anything is possible.
The Bondagers are another chapter in Scots history which isn't pretty. Confined to female farmworkers it was also a kind of slavery.
relativelyscottish.com/bondagers-berwickshire-roxburghshire/

Why aren’t we taught any of this in History? When I worked in Bristol one of my staff told me she was the daughter of a docker. If there were no boats to be unloaded the family starved. When a boat did come in he had to be one of the ‘lucky’ ones taken on. Bristol want to do research of black history in Bristol. Why can’t it be of all those who were treated badly? Mostly by the same rich people.

I knew all this - bondagers, agricultural workers tied to the farm, miners tied to the mine-owner, dockers having to compete for work on the dockside or have none. I don't remember specifically being taught it at school, but I heard it from somewhere. Why has the knowledge not been spread round more?

My own grandfather worked for the council, painting the outsides of council houses. If the weather was totally unsuitable for painting the outsides, they had to turn up for work nevertheless, and wait around outside in the pouring rain, snow or gale until someone in a warm dry office decreed that, yes, working was impossible, then they were sent home. By then it was too late in the day for them to find any casual work at anything else - he reckoned that was deliberate, keeping them dependent on the job.. Every winter he had a series of chest infections but had to turn out early in the morning just the same all winter.

When you say white supremacy, do you mean white privilege?

If so, it doesn't mean that all white people have always had privileged lives. It means that they don't have added disadvantage simply because they are white. It is an unhelpful phrase, as it does suggest that white people are privileged in the same way that rich people are, when clearly there are so many examples of how that has never applied.

I ask as white supremacy doesn't make sense in the context of this thread, not to be pedantic.

I once read that the indentured white servants on Caribbean sugar plantations, fared even worse than the slaves.

Until relatively very recent times, was there ever an era when the lives of most poor people - whatever their colour - weren’t ‘nasty, brutish and short’ - to quote a historian I read many years ago?

One of my uncles died, crushed to death by machinery in a Scottish mine, leaving a pregnant wife and five children. I remember all the miners walking behind the hearse to the cemetery. The baby died six months after she was born. Another three uncles died from pneumoconiosis. It was indeed a harsh life.

Did you know that Irish children were sent to WI to work with the slaves on plantations They were one step up from the black slaves but slaves never the less they could only get their freedom after 14 years

The history of working people in all countries is filled with mistreatment and exploitation, from mine workers to agricultural workers and factory workers. Many were bound to their employers for periods of time, many were forced to spend their wages in the company shops where produce was overpriced and adulterated (the Cooperative movement was formed to counter this). But it pales into insigniificance when compared with the treatment of those involved in the slave trade.
Scottish miners' children were not bound unless they were sent down the mine, unlike slave children on plantations who could be seperated from their parents and sold at any time.
Africans were transported in terrible conditions on ships and died in their thousands. Their treatment was appalling. I still remember seeing the instruments used in their punishment in the Wilberforce museum. For a vivid descrption of slavery read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, but it's a difficult read. And it was all about profit.
Working class men exploited women as well there is evidence of men selling their wife at a market and this in the 19th century. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom)

It's very complicated as some slaves in the West Indies were appointed as overseers.

Some women and children were well treated by slave owners, although the owners still maintained a position of dominance. Was that white or Male supremacy.

Some slave owners recognised and educated the children they had with their slaves, for example this one who rose to prominence but himself became a slave owner:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-33690383

That period of history is full of stories of children being sent down the mines, in Wales, Somerset, Cornwall and children working in dangerous conditions in cotton and woollen mills, going up chimneys as sweeps etc.

What is more worrying is that slavery still exists today.

It’s not either/or is it? Are you trying to say that discrimination on the basis of colour doesn’t or never has existed.? That Africans weren’t transported from their homelands and treated less than animals ? To be raped/ murdered/ sold? Yes, history is littered with stories of inequality, but because horrible things happened in A, we shouldn’t care or know about B. The same wealthy class of white people were exploiting the poor peasant class as well as enslaved Africans. We should all be aware of all of these stories surely?.

Trisher they have made a film called “The Underground Railroad” showing on Amazon Prime.

VR the wealthy class got wealthy and stayed wealthy on the backs of poor whites and blacks. I just never realised Scottish miners were enslaved.

I remember reading a book about small children who were sent down the mines in Somerset. They had straps attached to them and hauled the trucks of coal, crawling on their hands and knees from the working to the coal face.
They got permanent scars from where the straps left weals on their bodies.
This happened in other areas too.

Having been down a Welsh coal mine I can only imagine how horrendous their lives must have been.

Why question white supremacy though OP? Yes The exploitation and treatment of the poor of whatever colour is abhorrent and still goes on - child labour and human trafficking. The enslavement of Africans was one particular historical example whereby slavery was legitimised and carried out on an industrial scale. We still have many examples of its legacy in discrimination and racism. Your OP tries to minimise that.

We are taught this in history class. At least I was. I wrote an essay on the subject and often bring the subject up when discussing slavery.
Man’s inhumanity to man.

Wow, 25Avalon, I never knew that. We learnt about the use of young children in factories but not in mines and certainly not the conditions you mention. I’m off to learn more.

VR that is not what I meant. We know how badly black slaves were treated on the plantations - lots of books on it and well recorded in History. Additionally I studied US history and was horrified by what I read. It was a shock to discover Scottish miners were enslaved from birth and wore neck bracelets proclaiming who their master was. This is not to diminish what happened to black slaves but to bring in the open what happened to white miners in Scotland. Yes little children were sent down the mines in Somerset and worked with the guss and crook (find out more at radstockmuseum.co.uk) but they were not actually owned and lucky ones could find other employment. The miners in Scotland had no choice and were slaves for life.

Interesting Esspee that you were taught this in history.

I shall read this book while remembering it is 'A work of Historical Fiction' Ken Follet not being a historian.
I shall look into it myself . I am 39%scotland in my dna

Avalon, it is all indeed class war. It still is class war. Black inferiorty, and the Atlantic slave trade are aspects of class war.

Class was is when the powerful, usually men, historically usually white men, cling to their power and wealth by fair means or foul.

All empires were founded upon class war; commercial empires today are founded upon class war.

I ask as white supremacy doesn't make sense in the context of this thread, not to be pedantic.

I think that 'white supremacy' is appropriate in this context. I think that Avalon is proposing that not all 'whites' were supreme. I take 'supreme' in this context to mean that their interests, power and way of life takes precedence over everyone else's. Which, for a certain section of the white population, it clearly did.

OTOH, if you're reading 'white supremacy' as racial supremacy there is a different view to be had.

But where do you fit in the 'white' people enslaved by other races? There was, for example, a long tradition of white enslavement by the 'Barbary Pirates' of North Africa; much of it happening at around the same time that Avalon's miners were being enslaved..