The trafficking of the Irish for cheap labor began in earnest when England began colonizing the New World, and at the same time increased their domination of Ireland. Rebels and criminals—and often their families—often found themselves being deported, especially to island plantations in the Caribbean and later to “Van Deman’s Land” (penal colonies in Australia). Most often, however, they were indentured servants, under four to seven year contracts to work the sugar cane, tobacco or cotton fields until their time ran out and they would be released from indenture. In practice, the masters sometimes extended the time of indenture; others, for whom the indentured servant was not the lifelong investment that a black or native American slave was, had no compunction about working the indentured servant to death in his last year.

For the Irish, the worst period of indentured servitude began with their rebellion against English rule in 1641, through the Cromwellian Commonwealth and on through the early 18th century, when there were mass deportations as a means of essentially moving the “Irish Problem” elsewhere. Nevertheless, the vast majority of indentured Irish, once their time was up, left the plantations (save for some 10 percent who had established their own), to try their luck anywhere else in the colonies—and often, in spite of centuries of anti-Irish prejudice, managing to establish new lives and livelihoods.

Still, a good many former indentured servants, released without any education, practical training, money or prospects—and a greatly reduced outlook regarding the value of human life in general—made their way to ports such as Kingston, Jamaica, and found their way into more profitable employment under certain enterprising sea captains such as Bartholomew Portugues, Francis Lolonois and Henry Morgan.

Chinese too: The apprenticeship system is just one form of unfree labor, either involuntary or without pay, that helped build California in the early days of its statehood. Despite being admitted to the Union as a free state, in the 1850s California was home to enslaved Black people toiling in bondage. Chinese, Sonoran, Chilean, and Hawaiian laborers were brought over under the auspices of debt peonage; and a significant number of Chinese women were enslaved in the sex trade.

In the early part of the Gold Rush, Chinese “coolies,” an anachronistic British term describing indentured laborers from Asia, were brought under similar arrangements, with American or Western companies paying for their travel and then forcing them to work off the debt. But after 1851, most Chinese men came by way of their own countrymen, through the credit-ticket system, facilitated by the Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco. These men were in a form of debt bondage, but it was not as vicious or strict as other forms, particularly the coolie labor taking place in Cuba, where conditions in some cases resembled those faced by enslaved Black people.

Like many Indigenous slave laborers, Chinese sex workers were often treated as disposable, and had little agency over their own circumstances. Hirata documents instances of women being beaten to death by brothel owners. Suicide and opium addiction were rampant. Even the highest-status prostitutes could be bought and sold to other brothels, or to a wealthy man looking for a wife.

And still we Chinese do not demand reparations.

I am strongly opposed to any reparations for Irish. A bunch of drunken sods.

No one cares about the chinks. Fuck them.

chpsy Wrote:
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> No one cares about niggers. Fuck them.


FIFY

Does gerry get reparations for being a slave to the cock?