From workhouse girls to colonial Governors, and from Tangiers to Tasmania, Kate O’Malley and Abie Philbin Bowman uncover the fascinating stories of Irish people whose lives were shaped by their service in, or agitation against, the British Empire.
Ep. 4: Irish Imperial Lives. Slave Traders and Whistle Blowers: The Irish of The Caribbean
Kerryman David Tuohy captained four expeditions which oversaw the forced transport of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. Tuohy used his money to finance similar expeditions and died a rich man in his adopted home of Liverpool. Dublin-born sailor James Field Stanfield witnessed the horrors of the same trade as a working sailor, but his poignant and horrifying accounts of the ‘floating dungeon’ filled with ‘howlings of despair’ provided powerful testimony to the abolitionist movement. Howe Peter Browne, who inherited his family’s Jamaican plantations, before becoming Governor of the island in 1834, was charged with implementing reforms that would end enslavement. A century later the lives of two Irish women who went to Trinidad as teachers recount aspects of a shared Irish-Caribbean anti-colonialism. They became involved in political agitation on the island, for which they were both imprisoned, one of them tragically dying there.
