White Cargo
White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain’s American colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
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. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.
This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.
Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860
published by University of South Carolina Press:
Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system exclusively maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but Larry Koger's authoritative study portrays the small yet significant role that African Americans played as masters in the peculiar institution. By profiling South Carolina's diverse population of African-American slaveowners, he demonstrates that free African-Americans embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they–like their white counterparts–exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses.
https://nalert.blogspot.com/2018/09/black-slaveholders-and-whites-slaves-in.html