Damn Cocaloch, you've been educating the entire thread.
Yes, it can be both. I'm not sure what my co-worker's point was bringing it up though. It was a quick transition too.
And I recognize the struggle Irishmen went through, but when this type of stuff gets thrown into my face, I'm going to be defensive. I still wanted to talk about healthcare.
In the future, I will not talk to him about politics. I'll have to stonewall him every time. But damn... I love debating people but I don't like being the sole spokesperson for all black folk.
As I said above this is a particularly complex issue for me as an Irish historian who does Atlantic history in the 17th and 18th centuries. As a result I've thought about it a lot.
As to your other points, yeah I totally understand. That's why I wouldn't ever blame anyone for uncritically challenging people bringing up that sort of stuff. Very few of them are actually interested in what happened. For them it's just a weapon to hurt people. What happened in Ireland is terrible, hell what was going on in England during the Civil War and Commonwealth was hardly a cakewalk, but pointing that out is simply less important that dealing with it as it is used 95% of the time. After all when most people bring it up they aren't saying, "Remember the horrible things that befell Irish people" they are making a meaningless and blatantly biased comparison. They want to turn history as a weapon. As much as historians have a duty to present the past as it was, I also think we have a duty to fight against it being used as a tool of oppression.
You have every right to say whatever you want in response to someone trying to use something which for them amounts to trivia as a weapon.
You pay your debts with work, specifically by becoming a servant for another in any manner they need. May or may not have limits.
Basically, it is a form of slavery. The common form actually, in ancient Europe.
And almost certainly not nice overall.
It's not ancient, and was not always about debts. In fact the most common instances involved debts only in the sense that the contract which turned them into servants also made the master provide transportation to the new world. Moreover this form was essentially a mutation of the apprenticeship system. Apprentices weren't slaves and neither were these types of Indentured Servants. Yet, as I've said throughout the thread though, that is only an ideal type of indentured servitude. There were many different forms throughout the English Atlantic. It's convenient shorthand for a number of interrelated experiences, nothing more.
It's also not slavery in the American sense of the word. That's a large part of the problem with the comparison.
It was often very bad, especially for those that were forced into it through one way or another. Yet there were forms that were perfectly benign. That doesn't exist for slavery in the British, American, Spanish, French, Dutch, or Portuguese case at all. With the possible exception of the very first, as in maybe a hundred or so, black slaves in Virginia where they were treated as
indentured servants. (
Myne Owne Ground is the book to look at on the topic)
The experiences of black slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries is simply far far worse than those of indentured servants.
Indentured servitude was slavery, look up the indian indeture system and the way they were treated in South Africa. The only reason why that shit was "voluntary" was because the people accepting were living in poverty anyways and many of the companies they signed up with straight up lied. Anti-slave organisations were fighting for it to be abolished.
Not sure exactly why there needs to be a competition between the two, they are both crimes against humanity.
And I just caught this.
No indentured servitude was not necessarily slavery. Sometimes it could be something akin to chattel slavery. But at a bare minimum people were never owned. The contracts that guaranteed their indentured status were. You aren't paying attention to how people are using the argument in question here. You are right, slavery is always bad and indentured servitude often was, but the people arguing against this interpretation aren't bringing it up for no reason. People feel the need to make it a competition between the two because racist people use it against them. In the case I would prefer for people to not speak incorrectly, i.e. acting like all indentured servitude was the kind articulated in high school textbooks, but that takes a back seat to people doing this to contribute to the oppression of black people.
At the end of the day probably a very small percent of the population will ever really care about indentured servitude as a system, the fact that so many people talk about it should make you think about why that is and what the stakes are.