English colonies first relied on Irish and German indentured labor, not Africans

Evidence

To be sure, the leaders of the colonizing efforts of Britain had begun by exporting those colonized peoples to whom they had immediate access, that is the Irish. We have already made mention of that fact as well as the collateral uses of labor from Germany and Great Britain itself. It appears that the earliest investors in the colonies—lord proprietors, politicians, and merchants according to Pares—had economic designs that at first could be met by a modest labor pool. As independent venturers, the landed rich seemed most frequently to anticipate that their colonies would produce an income resembling in form the manorial dues to which they were accustomed in England. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 586

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of understanding the Black radical tradition’s origins—African labor was a later substitution, not the starting point. — connects to: Early Irish immigrants worked in conditions resembling slave labor — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 33