Anglo Slavery
Mikki points out that the fair-skinned Angles of Britain, along with the Irish and Scots, were once slaves of dark-skinned Roman masters (most of whom were ethnically Greek, Lebanese or North African) and they were considered an oddity, an agricultural thing with a voice. As late as the sixth century even Pope Gregory remarked on the oddness of the fair skinned boys on sale in a Roman slave market (note how later depictions show him as white-skinned as the boys, when he clearly was not).“When told that the boys were Angles from Briton, Pope Gregory punned that they looked more like angels (and probably bought them for himself),” says Mikki, “and the popularity of the British Isles as a destination for Roman priests with predilections for blond boys was assured from then onwards.”
“At the time of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 approximately 10% of England's population remained enslaved,” says Mikki. “Although trading serfs and slaves like brute animals was supposedly abolished in 1102 by the Council of Westminster, it was not until the final years of Elizabeth I's reign, about 1600, that the last form of enforced servitude (villeinage) finally disappeared, along with Roman Catholic rule, making Protestant England a beacon of freedom for the whole world.”
“It didn’t last long.”
“With the union of Scotland and England under the new Stuart king, the Scottish James I, and the founding of the colony of Jamestown in Virginia,” says Mikki, “the enslavement of the Anglo-Saxon race resumed as if Elizabeth had never ruled.”
“Poor men, women and children, especially orphans, were kidnapped and enslaved in the New World – along with felons convicted for petty social as well as political dissent.”
"It was widely held that social felons made better slaves than political felons (who, quite rightly, rebelled against unjust slavery) and in 1611, Governor Dale of Virginia actually begged the king to send such people to his colony," relates Mikki, "but by the 1670s Virginia and other colonies began to rely more on Negro slaves, desired respectability and wanted convict transportation stopped in order to attract free settlers (but any act they made in this regard was overruled and nullified by orders from the king)."
“Although all of the nine colonies outside of New England were penal settlements, Virginia was the main convict destination and gained a reputation for being hell upon earth, causing many convicted felons at the Old Bailey in London to beg for death rather than be sent there. It was that bad."
"Transports to Virginia continued until declared illegal in 1788 long after they had ceased in other colonies,” says Mikki, "but people trafficking -- kidnapping of innocent people on the streets of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales – continued well into the late 19th century.”
“Anglo children were especially prized as slaves,” says Mikki, “and most of the English orphanages that sent children to far-away lands up until the 1960s were little more than religious fronts for child trafficking.”
Read more by Mikki on this issue:
Labels: America, anglos, Barbados, barbary coast, convict transportation, england, freedom, indentured servitude, ireland, Jamestown, kidnapping, Scotland, slavery, slaves, west indies, white slavery
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