Irish Enslavement
While there has been some historical references of Irish enslaved in colonial America the main geographical area of Irish enslavement was the Caribbean. Montserrat is one of only a handful of countries that celebrate St. Patrick's day as a national holiday. This is due to the large percentage of Irish descendants in the population. In fact, most Montserratans spoke Irish Gaelic until early 1900s. During the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland many Irish rebels and stubborn landowners and tenants were rounded up and sent to the Caribbean to work alongside African slaves on English owned plantations. Jamaica also received a sizeable proportion of Irish slaves. The Jamaican and Caribbean accents are believed to have originated from the Irish accent. It is far from uncommon to see street names with Irish surnames.
Read more about this topic: Slavery In Britain And Ireland
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or enslavement:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)