I’ve never quite cared much for Brits. Until fairly recently I was uncertain as to exactly why that was, although as both a historian (academically) and as an individual who is ‘half descended’ from the Irish, I’ve always had a fairly good idea as to why I feel this way. That ‘feeling’ certainly wasn’t dissipated to any significant extent when I read up on English history of the 20th Century and it intensified exponentially when I began to delve into that singular American/English hybrid named Winston S. Churchill, whose almost single-handed efforts to get the US embroiled in another World War changed the world forever (and not, in my opinion, entirely for the better). [‘Sir’ Winston also had much to do with the previous (first or ‘Great War’) war, as well as the continued exploitation and subjugation of Ireland in the succeeding years, of course. With a reputation for reckless impulsiveness and a well-documented ‘love’ of war as a manly activity, his many misadventures (both brilliant and catastrophic) are still the subject of much controversy to this day among historians.]

Any American whose ancestors hail from the Emerald Isle and who takes pride in his roots is generally aware of how the bloody British subdued, subjugated and oppressed the Irish Gaels for centuries. For those who have taken that one BIG step further and actually read extensively on the subject of English colonial imperialism, it isn’t even a moot point: it’s a downright outrage that many of us hybrid Irish are unwilling to forgive and forget (we are a distinctly unforgiving race).

For decades I’ve had a vague distaste for English Anglo-Saxons either directly or indirectly, and when I began my studies of world history, my intuitive feelings of antipathy towards the English gained intensity substantially. Then, after I moved out into the world as an American expatriate, living and working abroad for more than 15 years and interacting with Brits, I actually began to directly experience the imperious, colonial cultural effects that are often manifest in the living attitudes of this earliest of ‘modern era’ imperialist powers.

While in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and in some parts of Europe (that have become known as favorite hangouts and resort areas of the English), I lived among and daily interacted with Brits, bringing my sensitivity to their ubiquitous, innate sense of ‘cultural superiority’ to a boil. [I can never forget the eye-popping, stammering and sputtering RAGE of a British expat I shared a flat with, many years ago, who, when I used our common tea pot to make coffee in, exploded with snarling, reactive anger! I say ‘teapot’ only because that’s the common American term to describe a vessel of this kind, although it is innately and functionally well-suited to making any hot beverage. It was a perfect example of that sense of British ‘entitlement’ that so many Brits seem to carry around with them. [In all fairness, I’ve also interacted with a great many Brits in mutual defense concerns, whose charming manners and understated self-deprecative nature gained them a place in my personal pantheon of excellent individuals to know and regard highly.]

But ‘White Slavery?’, you’re doubtless asking yourself at this point. What could that possibly have to do with our Anglo-Saxon allies in ‘Jolly Olde England?’ Stay tuned, as I think the following revelations will open your eyes a bit and serve to dispel the vastly lop-sided American outlook so favored by extreme leftist radical progressives that American blacks have a virtual stranglehold franchise on victimhood, as the SOLE oppressed people of any consequence in our erstwhile ‘land of the free’.

Although the familiar refrain so frequently echoed by such shrill racial evangelicals as BLM, the Southern Poverty Law Center and so many other black and white ‘lefty’ groups, that America’s blacks categorically stand alone in terms of being disproportionately discriminated against in the United States, the fact is that (each in their own turn) a wide range of other ethnic groups have also suffered excessively and inordinately from violent bias and hate-filled prejudice over the past 300 years or so of our scant national history. Among them in America alone (not including any of the rest of the world) are Native Americans (thought to have descended from Asiatic ancestors who immigrated across the Bering ‘land-bridge’ from Siberia, about 20,000 years ago and the very first to feel the racist wrath of white European settlers on this continent), various European groups (including German-Americans, thanks to virulent and lasting antipathies stemming from our two World Wars), the Irish Gaels (who fled to America, remember, in the mid-1800s to escape near mass starvation brought about by their British ‘masters’) and Asian-Americans (who have suffered profoundly from racial prejudice both before and after the Imperial Japanese Army brutalized China and its other Asiatic enemies in the Second World War).

The single most salient point that should be noted, here, is that violent prejudice, racial bias and abject (often irrational) hatred, along with ancient assorted tribal ethnocentrisms, have long characterised our every permutation of the human species on Planet Earth.

Just to use one example that is catching the world’s attention once again (under the aegis of Communist China’s Xi Jinping), the Chinese, with their 3000+ year old civilization, have long regarded themselves as vastly superior to the ‘barbaric’ white races and today that semi-repressed superiority complex has reemerged, as China strives both to achieve world-wide hegemony AND regain ‘face’ lost since the Western Powers literally invaded China just before the turn of the last century (in response, ironically, to its own shameless exploitation of the Chinese opium trade, in the 1800s). Japan has also traditionally disdained the ’inferior West’ in its past…a cultural attitude arising from both cultural and insular egocentrism, and envy of Western technological advances in science and mercantilism.

This sort of broad and widespread prejudice is, unfortunately, not the exclusive franchise of ANY ethnic subgroup of Homo sapiens but is deeply ingrained both in our evolved DNA and our most basic submerged, vestigial ancestral memories. We are, after all the trappings of modernity and feigned ‘cultivated civilising’ have been stripped cleanly away, still possessed of a distinctly tribal form of sentient (the critical differentiator). As the supposedly highest evolved, sentient mammalian life form, redolent with all our ancestral biases, antipathies and condescensions still largely intact and unaltered from earliest days, despite our having ‘progressed’ by virtue of Western science and technological cleverness we are still creatures of remarkable bias.

Much of that bias (if one excludes cultural practices, nuances, beliefs and behavioral characteristics) is grossly superficial (based on appearance). The main point here to take away from the foregoing is that human beings are evolved to single-out and pejoratively point to visual differences that exist amongst the entire family of man and don’t let anyone (such as a rabid female Black Lives Matter gaslighter, or an anarchic radical white liberal progressive, etc.) tell you otherwise.

In their fascinating and informative book titled ‘WHITE CARGO: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America’ (2007, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London, ISBN 9781845961954), English authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh explore the little remembered and even less commonly examined subject of how the very first American colonists were not the legendary ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ seeking religious freedom in the New World but brutally treated, indentured white slaves, comprised of undesirables and the bottom-scum cast-offs of English society.

At first, these ‘indentured’ slaves consisted of children, street urchins and orphans who, starting in the early 1600s England, comprised a perceived threat to English standards of law and social order (‘decent people’), as it pertained to the English upper classes of that period. Contemporary accounts of the hordes of parentless, often illegitimate 17th Century children who swarmed the streets of London and whom were forced to survive by whatever means they could in the rigidly class-ordered English society that Jordan and Walsh reference in their book, are often heartbreaking, but such were the factual realities of that age. In far too many cases, penalties for even minor petty offences by these miscreants were disproportionately severe (i.e. death). There arose, among more humanitarian individuals, a hue and cry over the draconian nature of such treatment and the question of what to do with them posed daunting ethical questions. Eventually, the English response to this furor consisted of proposing that they be exported to a distant land, rather than executing them for illegal transgressions (such as theft, begging, stealing, villainy, trickery and/or outright robbery) as it was felt that this would be far more humane than outright condemnation to death for non-capitol offenses. The first such shipments of these children occurred in the early 1600s. Not long after, older youths (those also deemed social and economic pariahs) were summarily rounded up and either transported directly to the new corporate colonies as indentured servants (colonies set up as Royally Chartered businesses, under the English Crown) or outright sold as so much chattel property to businessmen operating the struggling American colonies under Royal Charter.

Jordan and Walsh are careful to delineate the fact that although many of these pressed (involuntary) and voluntary (freely signed-on as servants under what turned out to be almost hopelessly ironclad contracts that virtually ensured that they would never, ever fully pay off their contracted debt to the master) individuals had been promised what seemed to comprise a suitably promising contractual stipulation of reward (in the form of land and freedom) at the end of their contract, in reality few did eventually realise this end. In actual fact, furthermore, the arduous nature of the work and the Draconian conditions under which these unfortunates labored resulted instead in hundreds upon hundreds (even thousands) dying prematurely due to either overwork or starvation. The end result was scandalous to say the least, but these were the days of Colonial English Empire in which harshly adjudicated mercantilism reigned supreme.

This transportation from Britain to a remote location (for that is the euphemism under which convicts and other economic undesirables, paupers, the impoverished or simply the penniless poor were removed from British society) was of course much better known and documented in numerous histories of the settlement of Australia. The fact that so many of Australia’s contingents of impoverished people, convicts and so-called ‘undesirables’ were Irish probably had something to do with this fact, since the Irish are possessed of a keen literary history and are also very much unforgiving of those who have done them wrongs, accounts of these English Colonial acts were well documented.

Developments in the ’New World’ were not as well documented as the Australian counterpart but that is somewhat due to the fact that this important history has been buried and/or subsumed within the greater and much more obsessively publicized black slave trade issue that still, to this day, fans the fires of bitter acrimony and prompts racial hatreds that have endured and even grown considerably since the American Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was approved, thanks to the radical liberal progressive left’s exploitation and amplification of what began largely (and legitimately) as the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Fortunately for us today, Jordan and Walsh have taken great pains to uncover and document the story of the early policies of white slavery instigated by Great Britain in the 16th Century. One of these little-known aspects of the story was the fact that the cultivation of tobacco, the very first commercially profitable crop found to thrive on American shores, was an extremely demanding commercial enterprise, requiring intensive and back-breaking labor. This aspect of the tobacco trade, combined with the perpetual starvations in the chartered colonies that resulted from a combination of inadequate resupplying from Britain and the failure of early agricultural efforts to achieve self-sustenance, was responsible for a disproportionately high death rate among white field workers (the erstwhile ‘indentured servants’). They perished by the hundreds, this mortality rate to no small extent exacerbated by the harsh climatic conditions that differed so remarkably from those in Britain. Then too, the ferocity of the indigenous Algonquin Peoples took a great many of the colonists lives (despite their having firearms), as the natives, neutral and helpful at first, quickly came to resent the English intruders…not least due to the deceits, false promises and outright lies and deceptions that were perpetrated against them by the colonists…and became bitterly hostile.

The conditions experienced by these white indentured servants in the New World were often so severe that mental illness increasingly played a further role in the harsh circumstances to be endured and suffered in these colonies. As corruption, avarice and duplicities also gained hold of many of the leaders of these colonies, the repressive effects were exponentially enhanced, most often to the mortal disadvantage of this social/economic underclass.

Before long, scores violated their contracts, struck out on their own and tried to escape their contractual constraints, for the tenets of the English Magna Carta (first signed in 1215), although obscure, were still resonant in many minds. One of the signal points to be made here is that despite its advances in industrial science, technology and economic development that characterised later Anglo-Saxon England, the rigid class system of England virtually ensured that those who were not born into the upper classes would be cruelly exploited by those ‘finer individuals’ at the very top of the English cultural hierarchy.

Eventually, in part due to the seemingly limitless nature of the New World’s territorial abundance, and also due to the ‘discovery’ of what England regarded as the base, undeveloped and ‘primitive’ peoples of the African subcontinent, it became increasingly difficult to rationalize use of white peoples as slave labor. With a few prominent exceptions, a great many of the African tribes found in Africa were regarded as a cheap source of slave labor and soon the black slave trade almost entirely replaced the initial white counterpart. As we so well know, this was the start of what today threatens to rip America into two polar opposite nations (whether by a future ‘New Uncivil War’ or otherwise) today.

It is important to note that the importation of black slaves was well preceded by the white slave, since although the discards of England weren’t technically described in those terms (“slave labor”), that is what the oppressive practices and customs of 17th Century ‘indentured servitude’ increasingly amounted to. As we all know, the practice of couching distasteful and unpleasant things in politer-sounding euphemisms is a common custom in all Western human civilisations. Another point to draw forth from all of this is that we have England to thank for having started the slave trade in America…BOTH the original white slave trade AND the succeeding (and final) iteration involving blacks. Most regrettably, viewed in retrospect, fully half of the fledgling American colonial colonies embraced the original English model, given that the tobacco trade grew, along with the cotton trade, to constitute the bulk of the southern American colonies’ economic livelihood.

As most of us know, despite the noble aspirations and vaunted achievements of so many of our so-called ‘Founding Fathers’, it is an inescapable fact that a substantial number of them were slave-owners (conscionable and/or otherwise) and many owned often vast plantations that relied upon cheap slave labor to generate their profits…which were substantial for that period. By the time southern plantations grew to such immense economic importance, white slavery had almost entirely ceased to exist (except in the case of domestic household servants, who were also often indentured but less severely treated) and today it is almost completely forgotten that early America (under English rule) initially relied upon white slave labor to establish its initial foothold, white slaves whose lives were frequently as oppressive and harsh (or even more so) as their later black successors.

I have merely cited a few of the central tenets of what Jordan and Walsh have so admirably set forth in their 2007 book, ‘White Cargo’ and I would strongly suggest that, rather than take perhaps highly reactive issue with what I have summarized here, you read their book yourselves. In addition to being a wonderfully informative history of some of the seamier aspects of early America’s English colonial endeavors, the book is also an enjoyable and engaging read. It is furthermore quite well-documented and not an unfounded reflection of any American bias against Great Britain but rather a story told by Britains who have explored an area of history few Americans (and certainly very few English) were or are even aware of.

Sadly and shamefully, it also constitutes a not-undeserved indictment of an aspect of English Imperialism and capitalistic colonialism that far too many tend to down-play, smooth-over or otherwise obfuscate in the foggy recollections of historical remembrance.

That said, I should add that extreme ethnic or tribal bias, prejudice, racial xenophobia and ethnic discrimination comprise no special franchise held by any one group of human beings on our planet. These qualities are as old as time itself and are found in all nations to varying degrees. They continue today to rise up like ugly specters on the political battlegrounds that characterise our national and regional interactions. It is, sadly, an integral, implicit and inarguably highly flawed characteristic of our entire species. Read all of the foregoing, therefore, with this uppermost in your mind and join me in praying fervently (even if you’re an atheist like me) for the permanent establishment of some sort of peaceful and humane human hegemony before we bring about humanity’s utter extinction.

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Postscript:

For any Anglophiles who may have tuned in to this, no worries. There are a LOT of ignorant Americans I dislike just as intensely as I dislike Brits, and of course there are always exceptions to any General Theory (I've found some English women to be er, ahem, shall we say QUITE attractive...Hello, Sarah Miles and Diana Rigg!). In keeping with my policy of equal opportunity crankiness, one of my earlier blogs addressed my dislike of the French (again, la femme Francaise excepte...oui!). Now, remain calm, be a good love and pop into the kitchen to make something for Tiffin!  ;)