To Hell or Barbados

$23.00

By Sean O’Callaghan. Here is the previously untold story of over 50,000 Irish men, women and children who were transported to Barbados and Virginia. Sean O’Callaghan for the first time documents the history of these people: their transportation, the conditions in which they lived on plantations as slaves or servants, and their rebellions in Barbados.

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To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland

By Sean O’Callaghan. Here is the previously untold story of over 50,000 Irish men, women and children who were transported to Barbados and Virginia. Sean O’Callaghan for the first time documents the history of these people: their transportation, the conditions in which they lived on plantations as slaves or servants, and their rebellions in Barbados.

An illuminating insight into a neglected episode in Irish history, but its significance is much broader than that. Its main achievement is to situate the story of colonialism in Ireland in the much larger context of worldwide European imperialism. Sean O’Callaghan’s description of 17th century Barbados is a powerful portrait of a society as brutal, corrupt and unjust as anything the 21st century has to offer.

To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan describes a moment in history that very few know about.

In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell (who took over England) encouraged the mass slaughter and enslavement of Irish men, women and children for various reasons, one being that the Protestant English regarded the Catholic Irish as inhuman, un-Christian and undesirable.

According to O’Callaghan, many Irish priests were hunted down like wolves and Irish soldiers exiled to Spain or France, while rebels and widows alike were forcibly sent to Barbados in the Caribbean as slaves. Over 50,000 Irish were sent to Barbados to work in the baking Sun of the sugar plantations.

This book chronicles what happened to them. Beatings, whippings, torture, rape and humiliation were just some of the terrible indecencies that these people suffered because they were Catholic and Irish.

Softcover, 248 pages