The Colony's Colony
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Growing up, I knew nothing about Ireland. Well, that's not exactly true. I knew it was an island. I knew it was green. I knew the colours of the Irish flag and that the local population weren't exactly fond of the British. I knew there had been a famine.

Somehow, the history curriculums that my teachers selected throughout my primary and secondary schooling never seemed to alight on Ireland for long. As I grew, I began unconsciously building up a picture of a country that was beleaguered by bad luck and internal turmoil, but nevertheless armed with an irrepressible spirit.

Only as I got older and started trying to address my blind spots did I realise what I had merrily characterised as 'bad luck' was in fact the impact of centuries of English colonialism and suppression. The internal turmoil I'd identified was the result of substantially imposed inequality, dividing the Irish via characteristics like religion and class in order to conquer.

Irrepressible spirit was the only bit I got vaguely right, and even that wasn't birthed in a vacuum but rather evolved out of a desperate fight for freedom. Like Scotland, Ireland was another notch on England's colonial bedpost, ruled from England continuously since the Tudors re-established the Kingdom of Ireland in the 16th century and made sure that it was subordinate to English political authority.

But this isn't a podcast about what England did to Ireland. Many of those exist and tell the story far better than I could. This is a podcast about Britain's slaving past. For this episode, however, we're widening the net and looking beyond Britain to Ireland, the country that had fought so hard to be free of British rule and take back its independence in 1922.

In the Caribbean region, however, migrating Irish citizens were about to reproduce some of the very same colonial oppression that the compatriots were struggling to rid their home nation of. I'm Moyalodhi McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

A quick note. In the period we're discussing throughout this episode, Ireland refers to all the land and territories that are now divided into the two countries we call the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today.

Hello, Human Resources listeners. This is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

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My name is Giselle Gonzalez-Garcia. I'm originally from Havana, Cuba, where I did my bachelor's in history, working on Irish history and Irish nationalist identity creation. I do research about family, family networks, business networks, plantations, coffee industry, sugar industry,

and how all of that comes together to map the world that the Irish migrants inhabited at the time. My current project is trying to map the different enclaves of Irish migrants all over Cuba and see their connections

to the Caribbean, North America, Europe, but mostly Spain and France, where Irish communities were also big, and trying to see them in their global footprint of the diaspora. Cuba's colonial history has seen it change hands many times. I asked Giselle who the early colonists of Cuba were and what they used the island for.

Cuba was a Spanish colony all the way from 1492 when it was, I quote, because discovered was not discovered. There were people already living there. But it was kind of like colonized by Christopher Columbus himself.

Cuba was not immediately important for the Spanish crown because it had very little mineral resources, meaning gold and silver. And then it started to be populated by Europeans, mostly from mainland Spain, but also a heavy presence of French and Portuguese settlers. What did the Europeans do in Cuba? Is this the beginning of plantation society?

They mostly submitted the indigenous populations to horrible labor regimes. It has been supposed that they were wiped out, but they weren't. Recent studies show that their DNA is still there, the descendants of them.

By the 16th century, they started importing African labor to replace the indigenous labor that they had. Pretty much almost led to extinction. But Cuba's plantation regime did not boom until the 18th century when they started doing more investment into sugar and coffee.

and by the end of the 18th century it became the main economic feature of the island. And we are talking about after the French Revolution and then the Haitian Revolution.

When Saint-Domingue went up in arms and the enslaved population there rebelled against their masters and used economic sabotage of the island as a means of rebellion, then the Cuban planter class that had accumulated wealth saw themselves as inheritors of

of the economic place that Saint-Domingue had occupied after the Haitian Revolution is that the Cuban plantation system really takes off and they start importing bigger amounts of enslaved Africans. What goods are Cuba's plantations producing? Is it mostly sugar, like other Caribbean plantations?

The main plantation system was mostly sugar, but plantations were also incorporating different kinds of staples like coffee, tobacco, cotton, and that mostly was produced. But Cuba, unlike the British colonies,

The British colonies were only producing the sugar and they were exporting it and it was refined back in Britain. Cuba was doing the whole process. So that allowed them to produce a more refined quality sugar that was soon in high demand on the world market. And the first decades of the 19th century,

It was a very well-organized enterprise. The capital that was being invested was significant and the revenue that was being made, the money that was being made was also significant. And so different Cuban cities like Havana and Santiago developed an elite, a group of families that behave as an oligarchy. And they were the ones that

were mostly involved in keeping a tight grip on the importation of enslaved Africans.

Because Spain did very little enslaving on their own, they usually outsourced it to other merchants of other nationalities, mostly Portuguese and Dutch. But in 1713, the British gained that right and they kept it until 1750. So they were the main ones introducing slaves into Spanish America in that period.

Okay, so Cuba has been colonized by the Europeans. The British have now taken over the dubious honor of introducing slaves to the region. Where do the Irish come into this history? The way that it operated, that the British crown outsourced again, the asiento, that's how it's called, to a company, a monopoly called the South Sea Company.

And this Southlake company, which was a privately owned company, but also had public funding from the British government. This company had a network of agents all over Spanish America. And their agent to Havana was none other than Richard O'Farrell O'Dayley, whose parents were Irish. And he was born in the island of Montserrat.

So he was already a member of the Irish diaspora when he arrived in Cuba to be the agent of the South Sea Company. The O'Farrell family, because of the connections into the slave trade world, became one of the top families in Cuba and one of the wealthiest. And they unleashed an alliance with many other families. So they married into Europe.

all of the other families in the oligarchy, in the elite. And they managed to be the family that was involved the longest with the slave trade and slavery. I'm presuming there were more Irish in Cuba than just the O'Farrells.

the Haitian revolution happened and Haiti became independent, but it also completely ruined their economy. And the planter class in Cuba saw an opportunity to make the island flourish economically. So that had as a consequence that they needed labor and they were very worried that Cuba was going to become a second Haiti.

if they did not balance out the numbers. So they started to import thousands of Irish labourers from the US, not directly from Ireland.

So they came to Cuba from New York, Baltimore, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas. So these were Irish people who had already emigrated and were very working class. And the wages were higher in Cuba, surprisingly, at the time. So that's what lured people into Cuba. And there was a very intense commerce between immigrants

The poor cities in Cuba, Havana, Cardenas, Nuevitas, Cienfuegos, Trinidad and Santiago with the U.S. because of the geographic nearness between the two countries.

So that's how the Irish end up in Cuba, working as engineers, what they call at the time, maquinistas, working to repair the machinery in the sugar plantation, but also working building the railroads, which were very expensive.

famous for in North America. They were participants in building all this infrastructure and building the canals, like the Erie Canal in Pennsylvania and the La Chine Canal in Montreal. So that was kind of like the kind of work that they were brought to do in Cuba. But Cuba also had ancient history with the Irish.

And it has to do with the geopolitical alliances in Europe, the fact that the Irish and the English were enemies. So the Irish saw themselves as a colony of England. And in their in their sake of independence, they allied themselves with the enemies of England, which were France and Spain.

And after the civil war happened with Oliver Cromwell and Parliament and all of that, the Irish sided with the Stuart King. And after the Stuarts were defeated, a big emigration of the Jacobite Irish went to Spain and went to France and joined the continental armies of those two powers in hope that they could then one day return to Ireland and bring independence to Ireland.

Cuba is located in the Caribbean region. Was the system of slavery underneath the Irish the same as British regimes in the likes of nearby Jamaica? Sugar in the Caribbean was very intensive with the labour that it required. So when sugar became very profitable for Cuba, the effect that it brought was the increase of the labour that was imported.

It was African enslaved laborers, but it was also, they were trying to replace African labor with free labor schemes because they were concerned that a second sin domain would happen. And the planter class in Cuba were terrified that that would happen.

And so they wanted to balance out the numbers, which I don't think they were very successful at, but because of the numbers of Africans enslaved that were still being imported. But they tried to bring Irish laborers from the Canary Islands, Yucatecos, which were Mayan indigenous people from Mexico, and Chinese coolies from Canton, one of the provinces in China.

And these people were also subjected to a labor regime that was as hard as slavery. Listeners might recognize the name Saint-Dominique, or they might know it better today as Haiti. This was an insurrection led by slaves against French colonial rule that began in 1791 and ended with Haiti's independence in 1804.

In Cuba, was the experience of these indentured labourers any different from those who were forced into chattel slavery? The only difference is that if they survived, they would be free after a period of time. So it was a regime of contract labour for a number amount of time, whereas slavery was in perpetuity. But this put Irish and other labourers that I mentioned working on the same enterprises as the African slave workers.

So this created both solidarity but also competition for labor.

And when I say that the Irish migrants, it did not matter their social class or their gender. They were part of the slavery system is that even the poorest of them invested acquiring slaves because it was a way for them to move socially up the ladder. They would see slaves as an investment

And they would buy, for example, if you were like a woman, you were a very poor woman, working class woman, you would invest in buying another woman, a slave. And then that would not only secure you some retirement funds, that she would also hire out that laborer and get part of her wages as an extra source of income.

So this was a scheme that was developed all over Cuba and in which Irish women participated, Irish middle-class families had from one to six different slave people working for them. Wealthier families, of course, had more.

And in the east of Cuba, in the coffee plantations, which did not require as intensive amounts of labor as sugar plantation, there's another case of an Irish property owner that he became the highest slaveholder in the eastern region with over 300 enslaved laborers. His name was James Jenkinson Wright. He was also a Dubliner.

And Wright has a very interesting history because he himself was an immigrant to the United States first. His family was of Quaker origin and Quakers were known for being one of the earliest abolitionist advocates. And they had a very strong opposition among their membership towards labor. So they would spell their members how they called it, disowned them.

if they were to find out that they were enslaving people. We've heard about Quakers behaving not so in line with their religious doctrine previously. In season three, episode two, we discussed Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin and the man who birthed eugenics. He was a Quaker, but his family also made their money from weapons manufacturing. I asked Giselle how James Jenkinson Wright's unsavoury behaviour measured up against Galton's.

Wright being a Quaker, he goes down to Cuba. He starts to, I have the hypothesis that he started to participate in some legal trade between the United States and Cuba. But he also started making money on the side with the slave trade.

And I've managed to find documents from the foreign office naming a trader, an illegal trader named Wright. And they described him as an Anglo-American, a Litz and Santiago de Cuba opposite the dock. And he's the one that owns the ships and everything. But they didn't have many more details on him.

When you compare it, he's the only right living in Santiago. His house was opposite the docks where he has his warehouse for coffee. And so all the different descriptions match him. And later on, he was named the British Broke Consul in Santiago de Cuevas. So he became a civil servant for the British Crown.

And he still had over six plantations and over 300 slaves, which was completely against the rules of the British civil servants. By that time, they could not be in any way connected to slavery.

But usually the British consuls in Cuba would say in reports to the Foreign Office that they were not engaged in any way or that they would put their enslaved laborers in legal documents on the names of their wives or in the names of other people that were not directly their name, but they were the main people responsible.

By mapping the family networks and by following the money, literally, then you can uncover all these connections and all these small trickeries that they managed to do to get away with this.

I'm always so fascinated by how someone like James Jenkinson-Wright manages the cognitive dissonance of his particular faith and a very active involvement in enslaving other human beings.

He left some very interesting letters where he develops this whole apologetic vision of slavery. He was usually comparing African enslaved people to Irish peasants and their relationship between the Irish peasants and the Irish landlords and the treatment between classes in Ireland to the treatment between a slave and master in Cuba. And he saw himself as a benevolent person

master and very paternalistic, but his family confronted him about it, especially his aunt Martha, in one letter. We don't have, unfortunately, Martha's letters because Wright himself said he did not keep his correspondence, which was a habit of the slave traders. Slave traders usually kept their records to a minimum.

to avoid being caught. We don't have Martha's correspondence, but in one letter he's replying to her, giving her information about Madden. And he's like literally defaming Madden, saying that he's a horrible person, that he's lying in his book, that the things that he says about Cuba, they're not true, they're over exaggerated.

So it seems that in Ireland, Martin had already published his works about Cuba and his relatives were reading his depiction of Cuba and being like, wait a second, but we have a relative there. What is the truth about this? So they were inquiring about it. And another character that Wright antagonized was the British General Consul David Turnbull, who was of Scottish origin.

And Turnbull had a very problematic history in Cuba. His abolitionist stance was very known and he was very public, was trying to help the African slave population. So he got himself into kind of like a network of conspiracies and he was found out by the Spanish authorities and thrown out of Cuba. But Turnbull, when he first arrived in Cuba, he stayed at Bryce's house.

And Riley frames it in a very interesting way. He says that he did not know this about Turnbull, otherwise he would not have stayed in his house, which is very revealing about how he

thought about slavery and how he wanted to continue enjoying that lifestyle, which he calls tranquility. Like the island of Cuba is very tranquil. Everything's peaceful here, which was not true. Riot lived through one of the biggest slave uprisings in Cuba, what is called La Rebelión de la Escalera.

which I think happened in 1844 and was very big conspiracy. And the aftermath was very bloody. Like everybody that was found out to be involved, even white people, even Irish people were thrown in jail and the African free people that got involved and also the enslaved people

were very bloody repressed. So Wright knew about that and he completely omitted it in his correspondence to his family back in Ireland. Channels of communication between the Irish in Cuba and the island they'd left behind remain strong. But what about financial exchange of cash? Do we see money flowing back from Cuba to Ireland the way we do with Britain and the likes of Jamaica?

There was coffee and sugar from the Caribbean going back into Ireland and it was consumed in Ireland. I would say the Irish, when they emigrated to cities like Bristol and Liverpool, that is when they take a more prominent role into this commerce. For example, in Liverpool, the Irish was a significant community there, even before the famine.

And in Liverpool, they started to be part of the crew

crews of the ships that were going to Africa to get slaves. And then because of the high pay, some of those crew members that were Irish were able to accumulate capital to then become captains of their own ships and rise through those ranks. And many captains, when they also managed to accumulate money, then they would be captain slash merchant and they would sell. So that's how the Irish started to participate in

very late on the slave trade. Another way in which Ireland benefited from the slave trade was precisely with the merchants. So when they went to France and they settled in another very important city for the slave trade, which was Nantes,

They were also doing the same scheme that they were doing in Liverpool and Bristol, enrolling in the crews and becoming captains and then becoming merchants. I think the link back to Ireland, there's nothing definite yet. This subject is now starting to pick up interest in the historian community. And now people are starting to unearth all those links.

The most connected cities would be, I would say, Dublin, Belfast, Limerick and Cork. Maybe also Galway because of their big merchant community that they had. To Belfast in particular, I have found this relationship between the linen traders in Cuba and the linen being used for clothing the slave population.

A theme that has emerged throughout human resources is the necessity of following indirect links in order to uncover slaving pasts. Monetary trails only say so much. What are some direct and indirect links you've unearthed when investigating the story of Irish involvement in slavery in Cuba?

There's this case study of a man called Campbell Falun. He was from a Presbyterian family in Belfast, and he went down to British Guiana in South America, which is now Suriname and the coast next to Venezuela. And Falun became an agent for absentee planters in Suriname, absentee English planters. And he was handling their plantations in the States, and that's how he made money.

And when abolition happened in the British colonies, which happened decades before it happened in the Spanish world, at least five decades before,

This Camber Falun decides to take his money to the Spanish world and invest in plantations in slavery, which was kind of like, again, this attempt to hold on to their lifestyle, to their status quo. So he goes to Cuba and he purchased a sugar plantation in an area called Alte Misa in Matanzas, that's in Western Cuba next to Havana. And he called his plantation Belfast.

That's the name that he gave to his plantation. So the links are also symbolic, not only the participation in direct sending money back to Ireland or sending remittances or sending goods, it's also naming practices. Calling a plantation Belfast is very on the nose. Was that the only example of naming practices that furnished us with details about the Irish who were involved in Cuba's slave trade?

The O'Farrell family that were notorious slave traders and slave owners, they had a plantation called St. Patrick's, San Patricio. And there's another family in Cuba, the Eoburg family, that had a sugar plantation called Nueva Ibernia, like New Hibernia, which is, Hibernia is Ireland. I found as well wills and testaments of Irish people dying in Cuba.

It's very interesting because in the wills, they list all of the property that they have, including the African enslaved peoples. And they list them as property, which is always very shocking for us to read. But that's how they did it back then.

And the families back in Ireland or back in England would do like a power of attorney for people in Cuba to liquidate that state, sell everything and then send the money back. So I have managed to trace, for example, 2,000 pesos and around...

£6,000 sent to this Irish family in the county Donegal in the north of Ireland back from the liquidation of a plantation in Cuba owned by an Irish immigrant. And they were also doing their business through banks established in London, for example, the Barron's Bank, which I think

It was the longest financial institution in England. They collapsed in this thing in the 1990s when a very big scandal where Barron's, I think, was pretty much involved with this history of the slave trade as well.

I was surprised when I visited them in London, their archives, that they have very little documents concerning Cuba, only two, three letters, everything. Because I think that documentation either disappeared purposefully or disappeared by accident intentionally.

over the years. I think they also had big fire at some point. But it was a known practice in slave traders that they would purposefully get rid of the evidence. What Gisela's outlined is a comprehensive and undeniable account of just how entwined Irish colonists were with plantation slavery in Cuba. But this is a history I have no idea about.

Is it just because I grew up in England? My general experience of Irish history through an English lens, before I educated myself, was seeing it reduced to very few events, often with some very glaring omissions. Is that why I knew nothing about Ireland and slavery?

I think Ireland, because of their particular history, historians have always been focused on other bigger events, like, for example, the 1798 rising that had such an impact on the island. All of the moments of famine, the small famines that they had, and then the big famine that

and the millions of immigrants that they had to North America. So that's always kind of like what has captured the historical narrative. And as well, their struggle for independence has also been a motive

I was recently reading, for example, that Jonathan Swift, which is one of the most important Irish thinkers and politicians in the late 18th century, he used the rhetoric of presenting the Irish and Ireland as enslaved by England. But he could not extrapolate beyond that and think about the actual Africans being enslaved. And I think this also happens in England because unlike Spain,

In Spanish America, the settlers went to the Caribbean, to Cuba, to Mexico, and they stay there. But in England, there was this regime of accentee planters. And I think the same for Ireland. Instead of thinking of like out of sight, out of mind, they did not have to be confronted directly with the horrors of slavery. They could get reports from their administrators, from their plantations, of their agents, and not have to see it for themselves.

So that's why I think by the beginning of the 19th century, when the abolitionist movement starts to pick up, there's more of an uproar in Ireland about it. And for example, it is known that Quaker women, for example, were not consuming sugar or products that they would link to slavery. And they found this as a way to boycott the industry.

That's absolutely fascinating. A material boycott of goods. It reminds me of how the modern pro-Palestine boycott sanctions and divestment movement encourages consumers to boycott specific companies they've identified as having financial links to Israeli state mechanisms, like the army. In 2022, human rights organisation Amnesty International officially labelled Israel's actions in occupied Palestine territories as an apartheid regime.

How deep did involvement in slavery penetrate into Irish society? Because in Britain, it permeated everything.

There's still been research, but I don't think it ever became very strong with the popular culture, with the lower classes and in their imagination. There were other things that were worrying them, like the land question in Ireland or the issues with finding work or the immigration schemes and trying to survive in a very direct way.

So that's why. But now it is pretty much after, I would say the last year, it has very much reunited the debate in Ireland and they're trying to find out what institutions benefited,

who were the people who were participating, who in the diaspora was a part of that. And that's the part that I researched on that. I researched their diaspora and what was the connections between the families, who was sending money to whom. For example, this right guy in Cuba, he was sending 50 pounds sterling to his aunts in Dublin

And one of his aunts asked him, is this money that you are obtaining from slavery, from exploiting your enslaved laborers? And he replies, no, no, it has nothing to do with that. It's the benefit of my merchant company that I have, blah, blah, blah. But it's all interconnected. So yes, the Irish arrived late to the slave trade, but they did participate at the end.

And they did not participate as strongly as, say, the English or the Scottish, but they did participate. And so they did find mechanisms to indirectly, when they were brought, to engage with that and benefit from it. So it all connects. Thank you.

Human Resources was written by me, Moya Lothian-McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz. This is a Broccoli Production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.