The Irish & Indentured Servitude

As European nations expanded throughout the Caribbean in the early 1600s, they established colonies that were designed to produce wealth for their empires. Generally, this meant using the land for agriculture, but that necessitated a large population for labor. They needed people to work the fields and harvest the crops. Being motivated primarily by profit, landowners looked for cheaper and cheaper forms of labor. Many Europeans began forcibly transporting slaves from Africa, but the English, in particular, looked to another source of cheap labor as well: Irish indentured servants.

What is an indentured servant? These are non-free laborers who sign a contract to work for somebody for a set number of years. Some indentured servants were forced into this system of labor involuntarily, while others voluntarily signed these contracts. So, what makes them different from slaves? Neither were regarded as free, but servants could fulfill their contracts and become free, while slaves were held for life. Servants were never truly seen as property, while slaves were. A contract owner held the rights to a servant's labor, a slave owner owned the person.

Indentured servants also still had at least minimal legal protections (for example, it was homicide to kill a servant), while those same rights didn't extend to slaves. Servants and slaves often worked side-by-side, but they were recognized as holding different places in the imperial system. Still, indentured servants often lived miserable lives, were abused and worked to exhaustion, and resided in horrible conditions.

Background

By the 17th century, England already had firm political control over the neighboring island of Ireland. Irish rights were suppressed, as was the Catholic religion, and prejudicial attitudes in Britain pushed the idea of the Irish being racially inferior and prone to criminal activity. This made the Irish an appealing target as the prices for African slaves increased, and soon the Irish were being utilized as a source of labor in the Caribbean. Over the next few decades, an increasing number of Irish servants were sent to the British colonies, and trade networks emerged in the islands for the buying and selling of the contracts for Irish laborers.

Irish servants were used as non-free laborers in British colonies.

Through this process, a system emerged that sought to bring more Irish laborers into the British colonies, especially throughout the Caribbean. Many of these laborers were brought involuntarily as political prisoners and criminals, or as the homeless and impoverished. However, other Irish laborers did sign contracts, making them more traditional indentured servants (although they were not often treated any better).

Why take on this labor and the abuses that came with it? Most of the Irish people, under English rule, were essentially peasants who lived near to poverty with no chance for economic or social advancement. Life as an indentured servant was rough, but at least at the end there was a chance of starting over and making a better life in the colonies.

Height of Irish Indentured Servitude

The period of Irish indentured servitude had two main phases. The first occurred during the years 1641-1651. In 1641, Irish Catholic landowners attempted to overthrow the English-dominated government and restore the rights of Catholics. The rebellion failed and, as a result, England cracked down hard on Irish rights. Many people were killed by English troops or died of starvation, but many others were also forcibly removed and sent to British plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.

The Irish rebellion in 1641 was met with violent suppression

The second major period of Irish indentured servitude followed shortly afterwards and lasted from around 1652-1660. This time, the focus on creating new, non-free Irish laborers wasn't from prisoners or rebels, but from children. After a decade of brutal treatment, Ireland was full of orphans. While historians disagree on the exact numbers, possibly hundreds to thousands of orphaned children were transported to the British colonies to be raised as laborers. At the same time, even more Irish adults were arrested and forcibly contracted to colonial landowners. In fact, so many Irish were forcibly imported for a time that in some Caribbean colonies, like Barbados, they constituted the largest ethnic group on the island.

The Later Years

For years, Irish laborers constituted a major population segment of the British colonies. Irish political prisoners, rebels, dissidents, and even ordinary people were still forcibly transported to the colonies, though never in as great of numbers as during the 1641-1660 period. After about 1660, however, the laws distinguishing servants from slaves became better defined, giving many servants a bit more mobility.