White Slaves of England

I've read the whole of this thread again and I don't see any 'agenda to minimise the horror of the slave trade'.

The OP wrote: This book, written in 1854 is an eye opener to the conditions of the general U.K. population stating in one instance that * slaves in the colonies were treated better.

She wasn't 'setting an agenda', she was just reporting what Cobden said in his book. Another poster picked that up and ran, and ran, and ran with it...

I doubt that Cobden was attempting to minimise the horror of the slave trade; he was just trying to illustrate the appalling treatment of the poor in Victorian times.

I doubt that the 6 year old child sitting in the dark 12 hrs a day beside a trapdoor in a coal mine was in any way consoled by the fact that s/he had a name and the potential to live as a free person. Nor, I suspect, were the orphan children who were virtually sold away to factory owners by their parish authorities, often sent 100s of miles from their place of birth, to work as unpaid 'apprentices' for years at a time.

The evils of slavery and of the conditions of many of the 18th/19thC 'poor' are equally abhorrent. There's no competition to say that one is worse than the other.

I agree with you vegansrock. Impoverished white workers, even bonded ones, weren't treated with anything like the same contempt and cruelty as black slaves were, even if their living conditions might have been comparable. It seems like an agenda to minimise the horror of the slave trade.

I think a Victorian take on which group of people were treated worse is a matter opinion not fact and shouldn’t be used to undermine he horrors of slavery which enriched many in Britain and other colonial powers. Slave owners considered themselves Christian, but saw it as their right to rape their slave women and sell their offspring at market. I think that’s about dehumanising as it gets. Any slave stepping out of line could suffer severe punishment including death at the hands of the owners. Bonded white workers were not forced to take the name of their owners and not considered property in the same way. Anyone who has studied the social history of the 17-19th centuries knows about the poverty, starvation, poor health, high mortality and appalling working conditions for both the urban and rural poor. To say they were worse off than black slaves is both misleading and irrelevant. It only serves to suggest that black slaves weren’t that badly off in comparison, which surely isn’t the case. Moreover it suggests some thinly disguised suggestion that black people shouldn’t complain about the sufferings of their ancestors.

Presumably this is a reference to the Barbary (North African coast) slave trade from approximately the 15th to the 18th centuries. The statistics are disputed, but it would seems that over a million people were snatched, mainly from coastal areas and boats. They were mainly from Mediterranean countries, but also from African countries. As far as I know, it was never so well organised or normalised as the slave trade to America and the West Indies. The Romans had their own slave trade too.

Something else which is sometimes forgotten is that African chiefs in countries such as Nigeria were involved in the slave trade. They sold their own tribesmen (and women) and others to white slave traders. Foreign slave traders could never have snatched so many slaves without the complicity of these people. I think the reason the slave trade to the Americas is so well-known is the sheer scale of it. There were millions of slaves involved and it ended up enriching whole countries involved in it. People were traded as commodities.

Incidentally, the involvement of Africans in the slave trade is a reason why some American and West Indian blacks still dislike African blacks and why some Africans see West Indians as inferior. There was a huge stigma attached to being a member of a slave family. The inter-Africa slave trade existed until the beginning of the twentieth century.

A long time ago I read a book called 'White Gold' - can't remember who the author was ...? It was a (non-fiction) book about Africans coming to British shores and stealing people to be transported back to Africa, where they became slaves - to be bought and sold. It seems that slavery worked both ways. (Why has white slavery been forgotten?)

And I am sure that a kind of slavery still exists in this modern world. It will be here, in the UK, and throughout Europe. In 2018, a reported 6,000 child refugees went 'missing' in Italy. Where did they go? What happened to them?

We need to be looking at the here and now!

Frognan, slavery is slavery whatever colour the slaves skin is.

White people haven’t been lynched and killed by the police love, yet white slavery does exist but it’s not comparable

Cobden was campaigning for reform of that kind of employment, so his language, like that of all those trying to stir people into joining his cause, was aimed at the emotions of his readers. I don't know whether he had visited a plantation worked by slave labour, so he may not have been fully aware of the horror of having your wife and/or children sold and never seeing them again, or your old mother worked to death and your brothers beaten.

Reforms did occur, along with other employment improvement legislation and changes in practices, but stamping out expoitation of workers was (and still is) a slow process. There is a Government update on the modern versions of slavery and forced labour at UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery October 2019

Notanan2

It nothing to do with color the Nazis had no conscience about experimenting on white victims, it’s culture, class or tribal, in some countries the blatant disregard for rights of others happens today. To the elite in those countries, the poor are only cattle to be exploited or ignored.

The download is available here:

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52423

I’ve not downloaded it myself so I’m assuming one of the links work.

And was (and still is!!!!!) Celebrated for it!

Genital/gynae surgeries. With an audience.

James Sims performed medical experiments on Black slave women without their consent and notably, without the anaesthetics that would be given to white women undergoing surgeries at that time.

Why? Because it was believed that black "cattle-like" brains didnt feel or retain trauma in the same way that white humans do. So no anaesthetic needed.

Slavery was never just about worker exploitation. It was about dehumanising and ownership. Owning them completely in every way.

“They are not seen as human” that sums up the division between slaves and their owners or managers, they are no better than beasts of burden to be exploited, sold or discarded.

In centuries past slavery was legal and normal practice, even encouraged by government, whereas now it is definitely illegal. Even so, scratch below the surface in your town there will be bonded workers and slavery, most will have been trafficked to the UK and are working their passage, most will have no idea how long they need to work.

I cannot find a download, and the only one I can find is by a Robert Sherard?

I can no longer hold a book nor retain it's information sadly, but is Black Diamonds the one about Wentworth House and the Fitzwilliams? My GGGF (not sure how may G's) was the saddler there, and we still have a very old oak pegged table that was given to him. Interesting ....

Yes. Modern slaves get their passports/papers stolen from them. They don"t exist officially. They are not registered at they addresses where they are kept. They get denied access to healthcare by their captors. They dont get counted as people. Theyre not seen as human.

There are lots of other kinds of exploitation. But slavery totally dehumanises.

I have just come on this thread and read through all the replies. I must agree with Notanan2 about the difference between slavery and bonded workers. In this day and age you would call people who are trafficked and forced to work in the sex trade as slaves. People who pay to come here and work for say a ganagmaster are the modern day bonded workers. They had a choice, slaves don't.

Has anyone found the free download?

I visited an abandoned tennant village like this on a school trip. Theyre now preserved as historic sites in memory of their inhabitants.

www.walkhighlands.co.uk/sutherland/badbea.shtml

Dismissed? Really? It was taught to me as a horror/atricity!

You really do not need to play down black slavery in order to remember other kinds of exploitation and suffering.

No one is saying slavery wasn’t bad but why has white slavery been dismissed

Has it been dismissed? Anyone who attended school will have been taught about the workhouses and tenant farming and peasant servitude, and you only need to pick up a newspaper or go online to read about people trafficking. It’s not dismissed or hidden at all.

Yet another distinction between the bonded worker and the slave is that the bonded worker was allowed to keep some of their culture and heritage. And if they couldnt remember or ask, they were well enough documented to find out.

In the caribbean communities made up of descendants of bonded workers, families even know what specific counties or towns their families originated from!

Slaves lost all of that. Usually cant even be traced to a specific country never mind a county or town.

Another example of how slavery dehumanises. And how it is distinct from other forms of exploitation.

Famine walls where starving tennants died with green mouths from trying to fill their bellies with grass while the land owners feasted within the walls?

There are statues and monuments about the famine walls theyre hardly "white washed" in some sort of "favour" of black slavery!

Oh and the starvation through taxation of tennants during the Irish Famine...
Suppose thats not well documented either..

Or you could visit here www.strathnavermuseum.org.uk/ for more "hidden" history

You'll find there are lots of resources. Not at all hidden. But gladly few that use the tragic lives of tennant and bonded workers to comparatively downgrade black slavery

Its no big secret!

There are some good Australian historians who write well about the early ship passengers but follow their story right back to their lives before hand so its not all based in Australia, it goes back to their conditions in England.

It tells you more about England than Australia, even though theyre Australian historians and stories that are half set there.

Horrific, but again, that history is available because they had names and were counted as people. At least that wasnt taken from that too