Dutch-Irish Cooperation in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wartime Atlantic

Dutch and Irish commercial interests cooperated during the Anglo-French wars of the middle decades of the eighteenth century to supply the French West Indies with salted provisions and other Irish foodstuffs. The informal Dutch-Irish relationship was best developed during the Seven Years’ War, when British warships drove French merchantmen from the sea-lanes of the Atlantic, effectively cutting off the French Caribbean from Bordeaux, Nantes, and other ports in France. The flow of Irish produce into the French islands was facilitated by an Irish commercial presence in the Netherlands, the Dutch West Indies, and the French West Indies, where Franco-Irish trading houses—with names such as McCarty and Company and Kavanagh, Belloc and Company—did a large business exchanging expensive Irish beef, pork, and butter for French sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton then available at bargain prices. Wartime Dutch-Irish collaboration underscores the opportunistic and adaptive character of Atlantic commerce in the decades before the American Revolution.