White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America.(Brief article)(Book review)

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America DON JORDAN AND MICHAEL WALSH. New York Univ., $18.95 paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-8147-4296-9

High school American history classes present indentured servitude as a benignly paternalistic system whereby colonial immigrants spent a few years working off their passage and went on to better things. Not so, this impassioned history argues: the indentured servitude of whites was comparable in most respects to the slavery endured by blacks. Voluntary indentures arriving in colonial America from Britain were sold on the block, subjected to backbreaking work on plantations, poorly fed and clothed, savagely …