Böcker av Thomas M. Truxes

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy

In March 1757 ¿ early in the Seven Years¿ War ¿ a British privateer intercepted an Irish ship, the Two Sisters of Dublin, as it returned home from Bordeaux with a cargo of wine and French luxury goods. 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. This edited collection is not so much "about" the 1757 Bordeaux-Dublin letters as reflections on themes, perspectives, and questions embedded in the mail of ordinary men, women, and children cut off from home by war in the mid-eighteenth century. The introduction situates the essays within a broad Atlantic context.

Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America's wartime trade with the French, New York's merchant elite conducted a business in the French West Indies. This book uncovers the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years' War (also called the French and Indian War).

An important contribution to both the new history of colonial British America and revisionist Irish economic and social history, this book assaults well established myths depicting Irish involvement in transatlantic trade as subordinate to narrow British interests.