Transported to the West Indies

1650s — In the aftermath of the conquest, thousands of Irish were shipped to the sugar colonies of the Caribbean as bonded labourers — a brutal chapter often misremembered.

Among the harshest consequences of the Cromwellian settlement was the forced transportation of Irish people to England's colonies in the West Indies, above all Barbados. Prisoners of war, political captives, and people rounded up as "vagrants" — men, women and children — were shipped across the Atlantic to labour on the sugar plantations under harsh indenture. The experience was coercive and often deadly, and "to be Barbadosed" entered the language as a word for being carried off against one's will.

It is important to be accurate about what this was: forced transportation and bonded indentured servitude — brutal, but legally and materially different from the hereditary chattel slavery imposed on enslaved Africans, who were held as property for life and whose children were born enslaved. The two systems existed side by side in the colonies, and conflating them — the modern "Irish slaves" myth — distorts both histories. What the Irish endured was real, coerced and cruel; naming it accurately honours it.