White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain's American colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.
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Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. The former classical music critic and foreign correspondent for Time magazine, he is now a regular contributor of political and cultural commentary to PJ Media and American Greatness, as well as a Sunday op-ed columnist for the New York Post. His awards include the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music criticism in 1979, and the American Book Awards prize for fiction for his gangster novel, And All the Saints, in 2004.
Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have each won awards for investigative journalism. Don Jordan has twice won a Blue Ribbon Award at the New York Film and Television Festival, and Michael Walsh has won a Royal Television Society Award. Together they have written four books, including White Cargo, acclaimed by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison as an “extraordinary book.”
Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.