ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the singular commodity, Irish salt-beef, and the set of transatlantic trade networks that it set in motion and that lasted throughout the pre-revolutionary era in the French Caribbean. After considering how Irish salt-beef figured in a French Atlantic world of commodities that was centered on the production of sugar by enslaved Africans, this paper follows the trail of salt-beef, beginning in Ireland, where the cows grazed, were slaughtered and butchered, and were then graded, salted, and packed for export. The story then moves to Bordeaux, the French Atlantic entrepôt where the salt-beef was sent from Ireland for distribution. Lastly, Mandelblatt follows the salt-beef to French colonies in the Caribbean, where sugar served as the primary source of protein for the enslaved workers whose labor producing sugar was the primary source of Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century wealth.
