Introduction

This introductory chapter begins by defining important terms and introducing the historiography of the Irish community in eighteenth-century Bordeaux. The chapter then examines the context and demographic contours of the Irish community in eighteenth-century Bordeaux, before surveying the pushes and pulls of Irish, French, and Atlantic history that help to explain the existence and endurance of the Bordeaux-Irish colony. This survey is followed by an overview of the colony’s largest group, wine merchants, who were confessionally mixed, and who used their position as intermediaries between French vineyard owners and Irish and British wine markets to foster the rich, high-end red wine that we think of as quintessential “Bordeaux.” The introduction concludes with an introduction to the major themes of the volume and summaries of the nine chapters.