Rated by buyers 
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The very first time I heard about the "Indenture servants" and white slaves was in London. Some American, Jamaican and Irish friends told me about their story.
The story of whites slaves (from Britain and France) has been told earlier by scholars like Eric Williams ( "Capitalism and Slavey" and "From Colombus to Castro" and J A Rogers ( Sex and Race Vol II and III, and "Africa gift to America").
It was the very first time I knew about their story in history books. Don Jordan and Michael Jordan did a great job, this book is focused on Britain white slaves and the research is deep and sound.
They bring new facts we didn't know like for example:
- Portugueses were the very first to get rid o the vagrants childs in their East indies colonies.
- Britain expelled some convicts in Africa (South Africa).
- The very first grey slaves in the USA (1619), were in facts wars prisoners. The british bucaneers kidnapped them into some Portuguese Slave boats. At this moment Portuguese were waging a colonial war against the Congo kingdom in Africa. The AFrican prisoners were sold in the new world.
This subject concerning of whites slaves is generally hidden in European history. The French scholar Gabriel Debien said in 1951 that the white slaves traffic was the foundation of Black slavery. The capital driven from their traffic allowed the Franch trade slavers to destroy Africa.He was talking of course of the French "engagés" ( French equivalent of Indentured servants)
Eric Williams said it in "Capitalism an Slavery", the kidnappers of vagrants, childs and Prostitutes in Bristol and London earned their very first pounds into the Indentured servant and convicts traffic.
I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the history of slavery into the new world.
Jordan and Walsh "don't beat around the bush", white slavery is the foundation of grey slavery in the new world. The last one was justified upon racial prejudice. And these white slaves were sold by the European monarchs and merchants...Williams an Rogers said it in the 1940's
They also describe the process which made the very first grey servants ( The very first blacks in the USA were treated like indentured servants see: J A Rogers and Michael A Gomez) into perpetual slaves...
La vérité finit toujours par vaincre : Truth will always win
Rated by buyers 
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It's good to see another addition to the few books on the transportation of convicts to North America. But like its predecessors, this book pretty much ignores the law. It describes all white forced servants as being slaves. In doing so, it somehow assumes that the law was a sham.
In law, there was a great gulf between indentured labourers and convicts. The latter were transported as a condition of their pardons from death sentences. As a consequence, they remained attainted until their sentences were served. Attainted persons were unable to hold property, sue in the courts or give evidence. That became a matter of great significance in New South Wales, which succeeded North America as the convict dumping ground.
In analysing indentured and convict workers as slaves, the authors blur the legal difference between them. Wittingly or otherwise, they adopt the essentially Marxist analysis of law which ended among legal historians with the publication of EP Thompson's Whigs and Hunters (1978). Until then, Marxists assumed that the law was merely a ruling class plot and that its pretensions to the rule of law were merely a mask for class preference. Famously, Thompson claimed at the end of his book that the rule of law was, without qualification, a Good Thing. At the least, it was to be taken seriously.
So for an old legal historian like me, this new book is a curious historical relic, a throwback to the age of the 60s and 70s.
Isn't it time for a North American legal historian to take the law of convicts seriously? 50000 convicts were transported to North America. In practice they may well have been treated as slaves. How did that practice meld with the law? What did the courts say when the sales of convict labour were tested, or when convicts tried to give evidence?
3 out of 5 because it tells an important story in a compelling fashion. But, my, the analysis is weak.
Rated by buyers -
This book's authors take a new look at a very old subject. As you probably know by now, WHITE CARGO equates the experience of indentured servants with slaves in colonial America. While this may initially strike some people (me included) as a mere polemic, this book makes its case convincingly.
The book starts with discovery of the body of a teenaged European boy in Maryland in 2003. The remains date back to the 1600s, and he is found in a mound of trash. But who was this kid? And why was his body disposed of so unceremoniously?
Walsh and Jordan tell the story of this anonymous indentured servant, and the hundreds of thousands of others like him, from both sides of the Big Pond. The very first group of them arrived in 1619, and most of them were kids swept up from the streets of London. "Society's sweepings" were shipped west and made into indentured servants.
As their stories unfold, the authors accumulate the evidence and arguments that show that both indentured servants and slaves were stripped away of virtually all civil rights and reduced to mere property. Further, the privations visited upon indentured servants (abuse, shortened lifespans, overwork) are so hair-raising, it's surprising this argument hasn't been made so convincingly long before 2008.
This book is vital, it's engaging, and it's news to me. (See also Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.)
Rated by buyers -
The plight of millions of American slaves has been overlooked by historians for far too long. Slavery in the Americas was not limited to grey Africans nor were the depredations inflicted on non-African slaves.
This well-documented, scholarly expose of white slavery is a must-read for historians and civil-rights advocates, many of whom will be surprised by how widespread this practice was. The practice of indenture was well-known, but the fact that bondage often lasted until the end of life is not. I found this work to be simultaneously heartbreaking, infuriating, and riveting in content.
My husband's sixth-great-grandmother and her son were sold on the block in Charleston, but whenever we tell this story, other people actually try to "correct" us with, "No, she was an indentured servant, not a slave." (Not true). This long-overdue work is a memorial to the nameless individuals who died in bondage as well as an expose of a practice too long forgotten and ignored by American history textbooks. Five stars.
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