TW: slavery and the slave trade
Sometimes when researching the history of slavery you come across a connection to your own life that takes you by surprise. Here's a connection I only made recently.
In the village where I'm from there is one old mansion dating from around 1800 and a lot of small newer houses. That mansion has been owned by the same family for centuries: they are the local Protestant landowners who made their money out of selling flax, the plant fibre from which linen cloth is made.
The reason that Ulster (the northern quarter of Ireland) has Protestant landowners is an interesting one in itself. It was historically the most Catholic region of Ireland, and the most resistant to English rule. It was sparsely populated and had difficult terrain, plus dense woodlands and bogs that made the guerrilla tactics of the Ulster lords effective. It was actually in response to this resistance that the Plantation of Ulster occurred in the early 1600s.
As punishment for the resistance, land in virtually all of Ulster was seized by the English and redistributed to Protestant settlers from northern England and southern Scotland. These new landowners were forbidden from having Catholic tenants and were required to import further settlers from England or Scotland to populate their lands (in practice it proved impossible to find enough settlers, so these landowners often skirted the law and rented to Irish Catholics anyway). The woodlands were deforested to provide timber for the new settlers, to make more land agriculturally viable, and to make Irish resistance (which naturally continued) more difficult.
It meant that very quickly Irish families in the area were either kicked off lands they had lived on and farmed for centuries, or else had to work the same land but pay rent to British colonists for the right to do so. For nearly two hundred years after this, Catholics were effectively banned from land ownership, until in the late 1700s they were finally permitted to buy back the lands their ancestors had once owned by saving the money they earned by working that land for the descendants of the British settlers who had seized it. There remains a clear religiously-stratified class system in Ulster to this day as a result of this historic injustice.
What does all this have to do with slavery? Well, the local Protestant landowners in my village made their money by selling flax to be made into linen. Much of that linen was shipped to the Caribbean to clothe the enslaved Black people who had been kidnapped from Africa and trafficked to islands like Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados where they were forced to farm sugarcane until death. The very merchant ships that brought slave-produced sugar and cotton to Britain and Ireland often returned with a cargo of Irish linen, beef, butter, and pork. On an island like Antigua, for example, the ecosystem was totally destroyed by plantation owners who deforested everything they could to make way for a sugarcane monoculture, naturally resulting in a situation where food and clothing needed to be imported rather than produced locally.
During the era of slavery, Ireland accounted for a huge portion of the produce imported into the British Caribbean. Different areas and cities in Ireland grew wealthy off the unusual role of provisioning the slave plantations. While it was linen that created much of the wealth in Belfast at that time, in Cork it was beef. This is just one of the many ways that so many Europeans benefitted off the proceeds of the transatlantic slave trade, even if they didn't own or invest in slave plantations themselves (though of course many Irish people did that too, including many Catholics).
It's often said that Ireland is where the British practised the techniques of colonisation they would later employ so ruthlessly in the the rest of the world. In fact, many of the Scottish colonists who settled Ulster moved on in a generation or two to settle Virginia and Pennsylvania, no doubt using the valuable lessons they had learned from their first attempt at colonisation.
But although there is no way you can compare the colonisation of Ireland with the unequalled horror of the transatlantic slave trade, it is so interesting to see the repeated colonial tactics of land seizure and deforestation to enable large scale industrialised processing of agricultural products shipped back and forth across the Atlantic, whether it be linen or sugar.
And of course now I know that the mansion in my village is, like seemingly everything built around that time, unambiguously one of the proceeds of the centuries of trafficking and forced labour of kidnapped Africans that underpins everything in western Europe.
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