globalized slavery
Mikki points out that slavery and prostitution are as old as the hills and both of them have been global industries millennia before the word globalization was coined and they continue to monopolize global trade today in the form of human trafficking and sex slavery from Eastern Europe and South East Asia.“Tribes first became powerful nations by warring against neighbors -- taking their lands and enslaving them -- and as nations expanded over the globe to become powerful, technologically advanced empires they no longer needed to wage war in order to enslave less advanced populations,” says Mikki. “They just landed on distant shores, fired a few muskets and terrified the local population into slavery.”
“That, in theory, was how the Latin Conquistadores operated in Africa and South America,” says Mikki, “but Britain from 1619 onwards had a novel way of finding slave labor for its new global colonies -- it first swept up its homeless children, then its surplus poor and then its convicts and worked them all as slaves!”
“It all began with the union of Scotland and England and the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 -- named after the new Stuart king, the Scottish James I -- and the arrival in 1625 of English sailors in the West Indies island of Barbados (deserted by the Portuguese).”
“The plantations established in the new colonies needed labor and because the African slave trade was dominated by the Portuguese and the Spanish, and jealously guarded by them, the English merchants had to find an alternative,” says Mikki. “That alternative was kidnapping and shipping out the surplus poor, but particularly orphan or deserted children whose fate nobody would know or care about.”
“White slavery was established as an institution as early as 1619 when the London Common Council shipped out 100 homeless children to join the first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia -- with more following in 1620 and 1622 despite the Indian Massacres -- and by 1627, in the early reign of Charles I, another Stuart king, it had also been established in the British West Indies.”
"And anybody who thinks slavery suddenly disappeared when laws were passed forbidding it needs to get a real education," says Mikki. "Slavery continued in all of its many forms throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries - and still exists today as a thriving global industry."
Read more by Mikki on this issue:
Labels: America, Barbados, barbary coast, convict transportation, england, freedom, indentured servitude, ireland, Jamestown, kidnapping, Scotland, slavery, slaves, west indies, white slavery
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