Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757

Thomas M. Truxes, ed. (London and New York, 2017)

From the introduction

“The essays in this volume illustrate how historians with very different specializations and research interests might—if left to their own devices—respond to a single archival source. A fresh and unexpected archive can be a catalyst, a bridge to fresh thinking. In this instance, that bridge is a collection of 125 letters tucked away in the “Prize Papers” of the High Court of Admiralty at the British National Archives (Kew). The letters had been taken off a captured Irish wine ship, the Two Sisters of Dublin, in the early phase of the Seven Years’ War. The correspondence is mostly from members of the Irish community in Bordeaux and its environs to family, friends, and associates back home in Ireland (as well as from Huguenots in France with kin in Ireland). Most of the letters are from ordinary people to ordinary people, all caught up in the business of their daily lives at a moment when their community was cut off from home by war.”