As we know, the overwhelming majority of African slaves in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade were enslaved by fellow Africans and sold to European traders. They were not, as the mythology suggests, seized from their villages by marauding White raiders, chained and packed on slave ships bound for far-flung destinations — they were already in chains, and bought by Westerners as part of a long-standing practice.
But do you know who the “Roots” style narrative actually does apply to? The Irish.
The demand for labor on Caribbean plantations prompted mass kidnappings in Ireland. In 1660 the British sent soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in order to sell them to Barbados for profit:
“It was the usual practice with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said country about a thousand souls.”
In Black Folk Then and Now, W.E.B.Du Bois concurs: “Even young Irish peasants were hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put aboard ship, and sold to plantations in Barbados”.
This wasn’t Irish enslaving Irish and selling them; this was the literal kidnapping of Irish people and selling them into slavery.