Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War ─ Reflections on the Bordeauxublin Letters, 1757

In March 1757 - towards the beginning of the Seven Years’ War - a British privateer intercepted the ship The Two Sisters of Dublin as it returned from Bordeaux with a cargo of wine in defiance of government prohibitions forbidding trade with France. Amongst the cargo seized were 125 letters from members of the Irish expatriate community, which were to lay undisturbed in the British archives for the next 250 years. Re-discovered in 2011 by Dr Truxes, this cache of (mostly unopened) letters provides a colourful, intimate and revealing glimpse into the lives of ordinary people caught up in momentous events. Taking this correspondence (published by the British Academy in 2013) as a shared starting point, the ten essays in this volume are not so much ’about’ the Bordeaux-Dublin letters themselves, but rather reflect upon on themes, perspectives, and questions embedded within the mail of ordinary men, women, and children cut off from home by war. The volume’s introduction situates these essays within a broad Atlantic context, allowing the succeeding chapters to explore a range of topics at the cutting edge of early-modern British and Irish historical scholarship. These include, women in the early-modern world, the consequences of war across all classes in society, the eighteenth-century penal laws and their impact, and Irish expatriate communities on the European Continent. Leavening these broad themes with the personal snapshots of live provided by the Bordeaux-Dublin letters, ’France, Ireland and the Atlantic in a Time of War’: Reflections on the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757’ enlarges, complicates, and challenges our understanding of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Thomas M. Truxes is Clinical Associate Professor of Irish Studies and History at New York University.