Liam's Irish Traditional Music - Irelands culture and tradition

We are used to thinking of slavery in connection with the shipment of black African slaves to America. This mass migration of people reached its height at this time. Those who traded in African slaves, or bought them for their plantations, said that Africans were inferior because they were black, were pagans not Christians, and lived in simple agricultural communities. We understand that slavery is evil, but eighteenth-century people in Europe thought that they were superior, and wrote at length about this.

The following description of the treatment of Irish labourers is interesting because an Englishman who disapproves of what he witnesses in Ireland writes it.

A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute. Disrespect he may punish with his cane or horsewhip. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottiers would think themselves honoured by, having their wives or daughters sent for to the bed of their master, a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people live.

Source: Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland

Those who worked the land as labourers in England and Ireland suffered the greatest poverty. Catholic tenants in Ireland were not allowed to pass on their rented land to just one of their descendants. When they died, their land had to be subdivided, and it became impossible for those who inherited the divisions of land to grow enough food to feed a family. The main crop they lived on was the potato. Once the potato crop had been planted and lifted, Irish labourers would go to England and find seasonal work to earn them extra money, because, they were used to extreme poverty, they took any job, no matter how low the wages this caused unrest and race riots, one of which erupted in London in 1780.