|
Irish Mercantile Networks in the Low Countries
Veerle Delahaye
• Introduction • Sources • Archives • Bibliography •
 From the 1640s on, a combination of religious and economic motives attracted a number of Irishmen to the Low Countries . This wave of immigration was followed by two others in the 1670's and the 1690's. As a consequence, the Irish presence in a region that was a centre of maritime traderoutes remained substantial until the middle of the 18 th century. Merchants who were looking for new economic possibilities formed a substantial part of those immigrants. Especially seaports were interesting places of settlement for these newcomers. Once they've established their business in their port of refuge, merchants maintained personal and professional contacts with their home country, but widened their range of contacts on the continent. This way of “globalization avant-la-lettre” hasn't been systematically studied yet. Especially concerning the Low Countries , literature about this topic remains scarce and archival material remains unknown to researchers.
 In order to rectify the latter problem, a IIIS-project has been set up. This projects aims at mapping the sources which give information about Irish merchants resident in the Low Countries from 1600 until 1800. It is however not the intention to put the entire content of a document into an extensive database, because the limited timespan of the research didn't allow an elaborate classification of all documents. What has been made, is a database that reports which archives contain what sort of information about which merchants. This means that the information is limited to;
1/ Family name of the merchant
2/ First name of the merchant
3/ Presence on the continent
4/ Origin
5/ County of origin
6/ Archival institution
7/ Type of source
8/ Item details
9/ Year
10/ Additional information
Back To Top |