Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

HILE the scale and significance of the English and Scottish colonial trades have received considerable attention from hisWV torians, the trade between Ireland and America has, until recently, been largely ignored.' The myth that the Navigation Acts prevented the development of virtually any Irish Atlantic trade was not challenged until the appearance of Francis G. James's brief survey in I 963, and systematic analysis of Ireland's overseas trade had to await Louis M. Cullen's monograph on Anglo-Irish trade and his later studies of the expatriate Irish business communities in France.2 Even these works have not completely succeeded in dispelling the obscurity of Ireland's role in the Atlantic economy,3 nor have they provided a detailed account of Irish