1st Edition
The Irish in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux Contexts, Relations, and Commodities
The Irish in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux is a collection of ten essays by internationally known scholars of Irish, British, French, and Atlantic History that covers the entire period in which there was a substantial Irish colony in Bordeaux (1689–1815). Among the topics discussed are the growth and decline of the community and the reasons for both, the daily lives and assimilation of the Irish in Bordeaux, the numerous activities and institutions in which the Irish were involved, and the patterns of trade and the major commodities that were traded.
This volume argues that the Irish community in Bordeaux was a product of contingent factors including religious bigotry and war, but mostly because of commercial and educational opportunities that were not available in Ireland itself. This confessionally mixed Irish community made remarkable contributions to Atlantic, European, and global production, consumption, and trade, especially in Bordeaux wine.
The book will enlarge, complicate, and challenge our understanding of the eighteenth-century European and Atlantic worlds.
Students and scholars who are interested in early modern immigrant and trading communities, the impact of religious tolerance and intolerance, the development of international trade networks, and the production and meaning of commodities will find it invaluable.
1. Introduction: The Irish in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux
Charles C. Ludington
Section I: Emigration, Demography, and Trade
2. The Context of Bordeaux’s Eighteenth-Century Trade with the British Isles: Its Rise, Evolution, Social, and Commercial Structures
Louis M. Cullen
3. The Irish Merchant Colony of Bordeaux in the Eighteenth Century
Jean-Pierre Poussou
4. The Irish Merchant Community in 1757 Wartime Bordeaux
Thomas M. Truxes
Section II: Between Two Worlds? The Relationship of the Bordeaux Irish to Bordeaux and France
5. Concerning Patrice Mitchell, Reader of Shakespeare, and the Maintenance of English Among the Irish in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux
Philippe Loupès
6. A Jacobite Refugee Family in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Bordeaux: The Clarkes of Dromantine
Patrick Clarke de Dromantin
7. The Irish College in Bordeaux and Its Connections to the Wider World
Diarmaid Ó Catháin
Section III: Commodities that Made the Trade: Their Meaning and Production
8. A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt-Beef in the French Atlantic World
Bertie Mandelblatt
9. The Social Meaning of Claret in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Tara McConnell
10: Inventing Grand Cru Claret: Irish Wine Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux
Charles C. Ludington
Biography
Charles C. Ludington, Visiting Associate Professor at New York University, is the author of The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (2013), A Long Shadow: The Story of an Ulster-Irish Family (2017), and co-editor of Food Fights: How History Matters to Contemporary Food Debates (2019). From 2015–2017 he was a Marie Curie Senior Researcher at University College Cork and Université de Bordeaux-Michel Montaigne. He is currently working on a book about Irish merchants in Bordeaux and their role in the development of Bordeaux wine and is also general editor of the book series A Cultural History of Wine.
