[edit] Shipments to the Americas, Caribbean and Australia

From the outset of their arrival in Britain, the Romanies were regarded with fear and suspicion, no doubt because of their dark complexion and foreign appearance that was far different to the local English population in the 16th century. England began to deport Romanichal Gypsies as early as (1544), principally to Norway, [13][14] a process that was continued and encouraged by Elisabeth I and James I. [15] In (1603) an Order in Counsel was requested to transport Romanichal to Newfoundland, the West Indies, France, Germany, Spain and the Low Countries. European countries forced the further transportation of the British Romani to the Americas.

In the years following the American Wars of Independence, Australia was the preferred destination for Romanichal transportation, as it's use as a penal colony.

In the 17th century Oliver Cromwell shipped Romanichal Gypsies as slaves to the American southern plantations [26] and there is documentation of English Gypsies being owned by freed black slaves in Jamaica, Barbados and in both Cuba and Louisiana. [27][28][29] Gypsies, according to the legal definition which was anyone identifying themselves to be (Egyptians) or Gypsies.

The last form of enforced servitude (villeinage) had disappeared in Britain by the beginning of the 17th century.

Slavery resurfaced in that century as a form of punishment against Catholics. As many as 100,000 Irish men, women and children were forcibly taken to the colonies in the British West Indies and British North America as indentured servants after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.[7] In the 17th century, slavery was used as punishment by conquering English Parliament armies against native Catholics in Ireland. Between the years 1659 and 1663, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland by the New Model Army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell, thousands of Irish Catholics were forced into servitude. Cromwell had a deep dislike of the Catholic religion, and many Irish Catholics who had participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and were transported to the British West Indies as indentured servants.

Occasionally, Scottish Highlanders and other Scotsmen were forcibly taken and transported abroad at this time. The need for labour in the Virginia plantations and West Indies encouraged planters and their agents to "press gang" unwary or naïve locals onto ships, bound for the Americas. Once at their destination, these people were indentured to plantation owners against their will. They were released eventually, unlike Africans similarly employed. Many made enough money to buy passage back to Scotland, whence they had come. These actions were justified on the basis that the persons in question were labelled as indigent, and under a 1652 law such people could be deported to overseas colonies.

It is also on record that a considerable number of Highland Jacobite supporters, who had been captured in the aftermath of Culloden and subsequently the rigorous Government sweeps of the Highlands to root out Jacobite fugitives and transgressors of the new laws against Highland culture itself, languished in fetid prison hulks on the River Thames for months, until sentenced to transportation to the Carolinas as indentured servants/slaves. [15

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain_and_Ireland