White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America

Every time I think I have a fairly reasonable understanding of American history, a book like this comes along and makes me feel gloriously ignorant. This is a fantastically detailed history of white indentured servitude in the early colonial period. Needless to say, it wasn't at all like we were tau......more

I remember learning about indentured servants while in high school, never thinking beyond the assistance given to people who wanted to reach America in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. So they paid for their passage by working off their seven years to their sponsers. So what, young Barbara Natha......more

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America was a good resource for my research into the connection between Britain and Barbados. I'm currently piecing together the story of my 8th great-grandfather and his journey from Lord of the Manor to slave on a sugar plantation in......more

Book is dogged by a degree of dangerous white apologism (as should be imagined from the title alone) and some of what the book posits as historical fact is highly contested / sometimes outright false. Still - milled from its inaccuracies and its politics, a shocking depiction of the history of inden......more

The indentured servant trade of colonial America is often overlooked and Jordan's White Cargo does an excellent of correcting this oversight. In this well detailed recounting of this barely mentioned past, the nature and origin of American slavery can be seen beyond the color line. Within all the de......more