White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh Audiobook

This post has 25 comments with rating of 5/525

• 
  beckam26
  December 4th, 2021
  

  

  Absolutely horrendous. Many thanks for posting

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  micamica2
  December 4th, 2021
  

  White supremacist propaganda. While indentured servitude was a horrific practice, white supremacists love to equivocate it with the african slave trade as part of their project of denying the existence of systemic racism. There were many important differences with chattel slavery:

  - Your indenture lasted only 7 years, after which you were freed and given the rights of a citizen. You were even entitled to land and even given a gun in many cases. Chattel slavery was for life, and if you did have the good fortune to be freed, you were entitled to nothing except whatever your former master was kind enough to give you.

  - Even as an indenture, you had many rights against being abused that chattel slaves did not. Chattel slaves could freely be raped, tortured, disfigured, or even just outright murdered for no reason except the amusement of their masters.

  - If you had children as an indenture, those kids were born as free citizens. The children of chattel slaves, even those forced upon them through rape by their white masters, were born into slavery. Slave owners even concocted breeding programs and experiments where they forced mothers to lie with their sons and fathers to lie with their daughters to try to produce maximally productive, minimally rebellious slaves.

  - Finally, if you were a free Black person, you could be captured and sold into slavery at pretty much any time and nobody would believe you if you tried to tell them “This is illegal, I’m a freedman.” Whites did not suffer this problem.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  BillyJack
  December 4th, 2021
  

  micamica2…… Well done!

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  KernGallowglass
  December 4th, 2021
  

  I would not choose a reef knot to bind someone.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  adequatespeakers
  December 4th, 2021
  

  @micamica2 Well said!

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  knglerxst
  December 4th, 2021
  

  @micamica2 Nowhere in the description does it equivocate the two.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  HarperTarot
  December 4th, 2021
  

  @micamica2 — I haven’t read this book, but I’ve wondered about it for awhile. It was published by a university press and received positive reviews in Publishers Weekly and the NY Times. Apparently even Toni Morrison praised it. Of course that doesn’t mean the book is okay.

  My impression is that the authors intended to write about the horrors of indentured servitude, but made the mistake of equating it with chattel slavery in order to emphasize how bad it was. This suggests the book is not propaganda, but is problematic and misleading or erroneous in some ways. Mistakes of this kind could allow the book to be co-opted by racists who want to relativize the seriousness of racialized chattel slavery.

  But I may be wrong. If you know more about the authors’ associations with overt white supremacist groups, or if you know of other works where they go “mask off”, please share.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  TigerMoth
  December 4th, 2021
  

  

  @KernGallowglass: Spoken like a true St John’s Abulance Serial Killer :)

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  jsynapses
  December 4th, 2021
  

  “White supremacist propaganda. While indentured servitude was a horrific practice,….”

  You sound like a white supremacist. How dare you call it horrific? That just gives credence to the uneducated haters. The holocaust is my number one while african slavery is a close second. White people can’t get to minority status in their countries fast enough! Then we can get revenge.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  boneswithfiddle
  December 5th, 2021
  

  @micamica2 This isn’t White Suppremacist propaganda. It’s serious historical work describing part of the British institution of slavery. It doesn’t equate the enslavement of Africans and the indenture of poor whites from the British Isles, but it contextualizes them as part of the same system, along with the enslavement of Indigenous Americans. White Supremacy as an ideology was formulated in part as a strategy to deal with the threat of multi-racial slave uprisings.
  It’s been a decade since I read this book, but it is much more in the spirit of radical historians like Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  knglerxst
  December 5th, 2021
  

  @HarperTarot Again, like I said to micamica2, where in the description does it equate the two? It’s not equating but drawing a comparison between two forms of servitude.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  skay
  December 5th, 2021
  

  @boneswithfiddle - Linebaugh and Rediker are academic historians who adhere to professional standards of evidence and wording. These authors are from the world of mass media, not academia (despite NYU Press publishing it).

  Indentured servitude was indeed horrendous and was initially intended to fulfill the same function as African slavery. (The latter was not expected to provide a self-reproducing labor force.)

  But at best, this book is extremely problematic, when it is promoted w lines like this: “the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule.”

  Even the white indentured servants benefited from race-based legal codes. Indeed, that was the purpose of these laws after Bacon’s Rebellion. And the servants didn’t see their children taken away and sold like animals. CHATTEL slavery, esp when combined w biological racism, is uniquely different from the slavery of indentured servitude. The two populations did NOT suffer the same brutalities. (And I suspect the white indentured servants did not experience the same level of degradation throughout British rule, as that quote from the publisher or authors implies.)

  Sharecropping was also indentured servitude. But we don’t speak of it like we do the era of chattel slavery.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  illodiini
  December 5th, 2021
  

  Can’t be bothered to read all the comments, but I think the point of the book is, besides history telling, reminding people that while racism is a fact, greed is even stronger factor in human misery.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  micamica2
  December 6th, 2021
  

  I admit that I haven’t read the book, but the equivocation is all throughout the blurb:

  “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves.”

  “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.”

  “This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery.”

  Now I’ll freely admit that the blurb is not always representative of what’s inside the actual book (as the author often doesn’t get any say in it), but judging by the blurb alone, these are all the classic white supremacist “The Irish were slaves too so Black people have nothing to complain about” talking points.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  Mria
  December 6th, 2021
  

  micamica2 is right

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  notmebug191
  December 6th, 2021
  

  https://limerick1914.medium.com/reviewing-the-fallout-from-an-influential-but-fatally-flawed-work-of-popular-history-about-white-be6cfc37069b

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  ironbuttaxe
  December 6th, 2021
  

  “I admit I haven’t read the book” but I hate it anyway LOL, Woke logic at its very best. If ‘white’ indentured service doesn’t bother you, try the Barbary slave trade, maybe that’ll cure you of your racist bias to suffering.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  trollprince
  December 6th, 2021
  

  

  @micamica2, me doth think you protest too much, boy! Afraid somebody’s gonna horn-in on your little grift?

  LMAO

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  pronoss
  December 7th, 2021
  

  

  I read the book and all these retards pretending to know something about it after claiming they didn’t read it are hilarious and are so completely wrong to the point of absurdity.

  The physical book is really good as it has a great bibliography in the back that sources everything.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  caesar963
  December 7th, 2021
  

  

  As an Irish person, as a human being, it’s repugnant to see characters using this issue as an expedient political football. In addition to this form of servitude, where children were worked to death - & the matter of other people who did not will their condition - there was also the continuing, ever-present burden of the penal laws.
  Previous invaders operated Dublin as the largest slave market in Western Europe. Slavery is not solely an historical matter - it never actually stopped.
  This history is not forgotten where I come from. It’s viewed for what it is: yet another instance of wider brutish imperial racism & cruelty.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  nitrolpost
  December 8th, 2021
  

  

  guys. Would you plese read the book first and then write your opinion about it. Please

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  leiito
  December 9th, 2021
  

  more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves? Unbelievable, this means more white than African slaves were shipped to North America, there were around 300.000 of the latter according to mainstream black historians. Never would have guessed. Interestingly enough around another 1.5 million white people were snatched from Europe and sold into slavery to Africa. So maybe reparations aren’t such a bad idea after all and we can all charge Arabs for the sins of their fathers.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  leiito
  December 9th, 2021
  

  If slavery in North America was tough, in Arab lands it was a hundred times worse. Tens of millions Africans were shipped there, at least 4 out of 5 were castrated, which is why there are very few descendants of those slaves even today, women had to walk around naked, always available for their masters’ pleasure. There was a huge uprising in 869, the Zanj Rebellion, and for a short while rebelling Bantu slaves even managed to set up an independent microstate.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  pbcaddy
  January 19th, 2023
  

  Boy is this a dumb book. It really should be called I Just Made a Bunch of Sh*t UP and Put It In Book Form. I’ve never read such hogwash in my entire life. Has absolutely no bearing on reality, like a lot of rmoor’s right wing crappola. But for a history book this is really shocking.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
• 
  wulfrache
  August 18th, 2023
  

  

  Great read. The whiney liberals should actually read the book before trying to critisize it. And yes slavery existed for thousands of years (and stil does) and had nothing to do with the color of your skin. This is a just modern lie cooked up by the same people behind DEI and CRT.

  White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America - Don Jordan, Michael Walsh

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