SOLD!

The Age of Discovery brought a wider knowledge of the world and led to the Age of Colonization. Colonization was accomplished through conquest. The lands conquered had to be populated in order to exploit them. The rich and powerful preyed upon the weak to supply needed laborers. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England became the foremost seller of souls.

The monarch of England gave vast tracts of land in the American colonies to favored nobles and rich supporters of the Crown. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, changes in the economic structure in England further separated the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots.’ The Enclosure Act deprived the poor of the Common Lands where they had traditionally grazed their animals. Tenant farmers were driven from the large estates by increased rents. They gathered in cities, hoping to find employment. With no skills, they became beggars.

Poverty was criminalized. The poor were transported to Australia, to the cane fields of the Caribbean, and to the tobacco plantations of the American colonies as indentured servants, bound to work the fields for a period of time, usually three to seven years, without pay.

The system deteriorated, and became a virtual slave trade. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean worked the indenture trade for maximum profit. Those in England used deceit and kidnapping to fill ships with human cargo. A child of twelve was viewed as an adult capable of working in the fields. Those in the American colonies profited most from those who arrived without signed indentures, since those could be committed to longer terms of servitude, bringing more profit. Ship captains worked both sides of the ocean for maximum profit.

In the sixteen hundreds, the ‘Great Proctector’, Oliver Cromwell, marched his forces into Ireland, declaring the Irish peasants could go to ‘Hell or to Connacht.’ The poor of Ireland were driven from productive lands, hounded ‘beyond the pale,’ and relocated to the poor lands of west and southwest Ireland. The better lands were then given to English noblemen. By sixteen eighty, over eighty percent of the Irish poor had been killed, starved, or relocated as indentured servants to labor in lands beyond the Atlantic. Kidnapping was rampant.

In The Bride Price, Annie O’Hara represents a multitude of transported Irish. Follow her journey down a road scarred by trial and pain, but paved with God’s lavish grace.

(The Bride Price, by Michael J Leamy, is available on Amazon)