What follows is a full list of all my recent work challenging contemporary propaganda (based primarily on ahistorical blogs and memes) which equate indentured servitude or penal servitude with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery. You can browse my curation of hundreds of examples of how this false equivalence is used on social media here (general use), here (neo-Confederate page) and here (Irish Central page)

Articles

(1) How the Myth of the “Irish slaves” Became a Favourite Meme of Racists Online (Interviewed by Alex Amend of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, 19 April 2016)

(2) ‘Irish slaves’: The Convenient Myth (openDemocracy, 14 January 2015)

(3) Two years of the ‘Irish slaves’ myth: racism, reductionism and the tradition of diminishing the transatlantic slave trade (openDemocracy, 7 November 2016)

(4) The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: servants or slaves? (History Ireland magazine, March-April 2016) — Co-authored with Laura McAtackney and Matt Reilly

(5) Anatomy of a modern lie: how the history of Cromwellian transportations from Ireland is abused for political and racist purposes (Tortoise, May 2019)

(6) When History Goes Bad (Rabble magazine, No.11, 2016)

(7) A primer on the ongoing proliferation of ahistorical “Irish slaves” articles and memes (introduction to a seven-part series)

My collection of screenshots of “Irish slaves” posts from 2014–2016

(8) Debunking the imagery of the “Irish slaves” meme (1/7)

(9) How the African victims of the Zong Massacre were replaced with “Irish slaves” (2/7)

(10) The “Forced breeding” myth in the “Irish slaves” meme (3/7)

(11) A review of the numbers in the “Irish slaves” meme (4/7)

(12) Exaggeration and the appropriation of the torture of enslaved Africans in the “Irish slaves” meme (5/7)

(13) The myth of Colonel William Brayne and the “Irish slaves” (6/7)

(14) The myth that Goodwife Glover, an Irish woman executed for witchcraft in Boston in 1688, was an “Irish slave” (7/7)

(15) Were Irish people “the first slaves in America?”

(16) Critique of Sean O’Callaghan’s ‘To Hell or Barbados’

(17) Critique of “White Cargo”: reviewing the fallout from an influential but fatally flawed work of popular history about “white slaves”

(18) The founder of Irish Central attempts to whitewash their influential role in spreading ahistorical “Irish slaves” propaganda

(19) The Ancient Order of Hibernians, History Ireland Magazine and the accommodation of ahistorical propaganda

(20) No, the Irish were not slaves too (Interviewed by David M. Perry for Pacific Standard magazine, 15 March 2018)

(21) No, the Irish were not slaves in the Americas (Interviewed by Eoin O’Carroll for the Christian Science Monitor, 16 March 2018)

(22) Encountering and refuting misrepresentations of the past online (Interviewed by Maurice Casey for History to the Public, 21 January 2015)

(23) Open letter to Irish Central, Irish Examiner and Scientific American about their “Irish slaves” disinformation (signed by over 80 academics and historians)