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From: Gil Hardwick <>
Subject: [GM] Re: Irish children & indenture
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:35:42 -0700
References: <200210191718.g9JHI5432390@askin-17.linkpendium.com>


Joan Best wrote:

>Anne,
>
>There is a difference between an indentured servant and a slave:
>indentured servitude was for a term of years, slave is for life.
>One did not "own" an indentured servant and they could not be bought
>or sold. A slave was treated as property, and could be bought or
>sold.
>
>Indentured service was either a labor contract for a term of years
>or an apprenticeship. Many people coming from Europe, that did not
>have the money for the trip agreed to work for a set period of time
>for his or her sponsor in exchange for the cost of passage, plus
>room and board during the term of the indenture. These were
>voluntary agreements on the part of both adult parties.


Joan,

There is no question that the English administration from the times
of James I & VI and Elizabeth, and especially under Cromwell, had in
place a policy of colonial domination in Scotland and Ireland
through starvation, terror and displacement. During the series of
famines and especially the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s there was
in fact a net export of rural commodities from Ireland while the
people starved.

Following the famine of 1822 it was primarily young men rounded up
and pressed into military service. The regiments serving here in
the Australian colonies, in India and South Africa comprise as many
as 50% Irish and 22% Scottish foot soldiers. The Pensioner Force
here from 1850 to guard the convicts comprised 60% Irish. After
1847, and in particular after the English had emptied their own
poorhouses of destitute women, it was women and children; the former
as brides and the latter as household servants, grooms and labourers.

Children who had not starved to death then being pressed into
service in English and other households, especially in the colonies,
were not by any stretch of the imagination subject to a labour
contract or an apprenticeship beyond mere platitudes and formality,
and certainly they had little right of appeal against the closed
ranks of the establishment.

Those responsible were merely mouthing platitudes over one form of
slavery in place of another, not on humanitarian grounds but because
actual slavery was by then economically inefficient under the
rapidly emerging industrial economy of the day, and in particular to
win the moral high ground and distract attention away from the
condition of their own people.

The fact that the emerging class of laissez-faire businessmen
repudiated actual ownership of those who did their labouring for
them can only be interpreted as reluctance to take care of them.
The laws governing slavery were at that time far more strict than
the new laws governing what became known as indentures, which were
in place for only a limited period rather than whole of life, and
the condition of working people did not improve until the
development of Trades Unions and democratic society.

One might argue, of course, whether child service in a household was
one up on child labour in a factory, but surely that is splitting
straws. In the matter at hand a slave enjoyed a far more secure
tenure than any child servant, who could be compromised and turned
out on a whim.

The facts are that the gentry were crying out for children to come
and do their housework for them, such that shiploads of these poor
wretches were dispatched all over the planet. Thousands upon
thousands of them.

Here in Australia we were still receiving them in the 1950s under
one pretext or another. Because of the shortage of Europeans,
mixed-race Aboriginal children, the lighter skinned the better, were
also abducted from their families and likewise pressed into service.

The thing here is a national disgrace, and so should the English be
as ashamed though I doubt they possess the capability.

Gil

Gil Hardwick <>

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