[Smocker]

Oh come on! The plantation system was created by the Portuguese in Brazil, and carried to the English Caribbean by Jews fleeing from Pernanbuco when this city, previously taken by the Dutch, was reconquered by the Portuguese in 1641. In the British commercial world the system was utterly improved. To avoid revolts, a sharp distinction between races was imposed by the elites of North America. (Empires of the Atlantic World, Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830; Michael Elliot)

Of course, J Aguilar, one's point of view will be different when one looks at just WHAT the British were "Utterly Improving"

ENGLAND'S IRISH SLAVES

"...Records are replete with references to early Irish Catholics in the West Indies. Gwynn in Analecta Hibernica, states: 'The earliest reference to the Irish is the establishment of an Irish settlement on the Amazon River in 1612."(1) Smith, in Colonists in Bondage, reports: "a Proclamation of the year 1625 urged the banishing overseas of dangerous rogues (Irish Political Prisoners); kidnapping (of Irish) was common."(2)

Condon states that the first considerable emigration from Ireland to the southern latitudes of America was to Guiana in 1629.(3) Newton declares that Antigua and Montserrat were occupied as early as 1632 and that many emigrant Irish came out among the early planters and servants in these islands.(4) Dunn, in Sugar and Slaves, asserts that, in 1636, Ireland was already a prime source of supply for servants: as early as 1637, on Montserrat the Irish heavily outnumbered the English colonists, and 69 percent of Montserrat's white inhabitants were Irish.(5) Lenihan writes: in 1650 "25,000 Irishmen sold as slaves in Saint Kitt's and the adjoining islands, petitioned for a priest..."(6)

In 1641, Ireland's population was 1,466,000 and in 1652, 616,000. According to Sir William Petty, 850,000 were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment during the Confederation War 1641-1652. At the end of the war, vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the English government.(7) These people were rounded up like cattle, and, as Prendergast reports on Thurloe's State Papers(8) (Pub. London, 1742), "In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls... To solace them."(9)

J. Williams provides additional evidence of the attitude of the English government towards the Irish in an English law of June 26, 1657: "Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught (Ireland's Western Province) or (County) Clare within six months... Shall be attained of high treason... Are to be sent into America or some other parts beyond the seas..."(10) Those thus banished who return are to "suffer the pains of death as felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy."(11)

The following are but a few of the numerous references to those Irish transported against their will between 1651 and 1660......"

Read ON:[ http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/SLAVES.TXT ]

Certainly, from an Irish Catholic perspective of the day, Utterly Improving would not exactly be the first thought that comes to mind now, would it?

[J Aguilar]

ChiMark

Are you justifying or triializing the extermination of Jews in Germany?

No, I am not. Read Gotz Aly. I just point out that once the Jews were stripped of everything they had, they just represented a cost for Nazi Germany, a cost for a country that was struggling to win a war. The extermination of Jews had, therefore, economic grounds.

Smocker,

Yeap, maybe I shouldn't have used those words. It is true the British experience in Ireland was taken as a model for the territories further west, but economically, the plantation system came from the Caribbean, where it was brought by the people that fled from Pernanbuco fearing the Inquisition.