By Oliver O’Hanlon
The film Saving Private Ryan was inspired by real-life stories. Readers will remember how Tom Hanks’ character was sent to the front lines in Normandy to rescue the eponymous Private Ryan, who was played by Matt Damon.
The story went that Ryan was the last remaining of his four siblings who were serving in the U.S. army and as such, he should be excused from active service and brought back from the front lines to the safety of his family in America.
This is known as the ‘Sole Survivor Policy’ and it was created following the awful experience of real American families who lost loved ones in similar circumstances.
The book presents 125 letters carried aboard a ship, the Two Sisters of Dublin, captured at sea in 1757, in the midst of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Most of the letters lay unopened for 250 years until they were rediscovered in the UK National Archives in 2011.
The letters from members of the Irish community in Bordeaux and their relatives, friends and trading partners in Ireland communicate the concerns and understandings of ordinary people in a diasporic community during wartime. Written by sailors, merchants, servants, prisoners of war, priests, clerks, and many women, the letters vividly illustrate social and economic structures familiar to historians of early modern trade and the expatriate communities of the Atlantic world. They underline the central role of familial relationships in structuring commerce, and illustrate how communities were sustained across wide expanses of ocean by streams of correspondence, by favours asked and received, and by a flow of commodities, g