The Irish, the whitest non-white people in the world. Funny to think that these pale skinned red haired people were once seen as anything but white, but it was a way of making less of a group of people who valued their religion just as much as their culture. Chapter 2 \u201cIrrepressible Conflicts: Systems of Slavery in the Civil War Era\u201d first starts out by mentioning the formation of nation states, a nation being an area in which a group of people with similar customs and language live together. These nations soon branched out creating Empires the most successful of all being the British Empire which at one point controlled 1\/4 of the world. The British viewed themselves as Protestant and took their religion where ever they went, in graving their beliefs in the minds of the people they conquered. Such as when they colonized the United States, the United States viewed itself as highly Protestant and held onto many English customs despite attempts to distance themselves from all things British after the revolutionary war. The British however ran into a brick wall when they conquered the Irish, a stubborn people by nature the Irish resisted against their oppressors who not only conquered their lands but their language renaming said conquered lands in a form of linguistic conquest. This form of conquest forced the Irish to attempt to resist British culture drawing them closer and closer into Catholicism to the point where to be Irish was to be Catholic, their culture revolved around Their religion. So naturally when many left their homes during the great hunger (the Irish potato famine) and reached the shores of America were met with racist comments and maltreatment from Protestant America. They we’re shove into unsafe factories, forced to work for a pittance making less than what was needed even make a living. When the Civil War broke out they were conscripted to fight and die for a government that oppressed them to stop an institution that they themselves were confined to. The institution of slavery, in Ireland they were \u201cslaves with no masters obliged to law, self-interest, or domestic affections to provide for them.\u201d In America things were the same they were slaves to industrialization, slaves to a system that forced them to fend for themselves and when slavery was eradicated with the victory of the Union they did not revive any of the reform the blacks were promised. All the emancipation proclamation do was to make \u201cwhite and blacks equal to To-day in industrial servitude.\u201d The free immigration of Irish was basically a reopening of the slave trade but this time the slaves had to pay to travel across the Atlantic to be slaves. In order to completely understand this reading we could look back to the previous post of my classmate Robert Deleon which help illustrate the change within the economy during the industrial revolution that would make white men slaves to the current \u201csystem\u201d. he<\/p>\n