H. T. Dickinson's work has done much to demonstrate the vibrancy of ‘out-of-doors’ opinion in eighteenth-century Britain. Drinking and toasting were integral to the expression of popular politics. Electoral campaigns involved an enormous amount of ‘treating’ and voters fully expected candidates to ply them with wine and punch. By the 1790s, the bibulous nature of British politics had become a rich source of inspiration for caricaturists, who loved to satirise the epicureanism of a Wilkes or a Fox and to depict the seedy underworld of Jacobin taverns. Contemporaries and historians have used toast lists as precious, if rough, indexes of popular opinion and, during the 1790s, as evidence of sympathy for the French Revolution and transnational republicanism.

Though perceived as a peculiarly English custom by foreign travellers, toasting was usual in the American colonies and the young republic, and was adopted later in France. Following James Epstein's ground-breaking study of early nineteenth-century radical dining and toasting, historians have paid considerable attention to political drinking in Ireland and early-republican America. This essay will build on this rich historiography and try to broaden the perspective, expanding it beyond the British Atlantic to examine political toasting in revolutionary France as well and ranging across the ‘age of revolutions’ from the Stamp Act of 1765 to around 1800. Though periodisation is difficult given the variety of local situations and dynamics, the end date is a turning point that witnessed some stabilisation after the ideological conflicts of the 1790s, while the consolidation of Napoleonic rule in France transformed the parameters of public expression.

Such an approach need not be predicated on a wholesale acceptance of the concept of an ‘Atlantic revolution’. Rather it starts from the recognition that toasting involved crossing the seas and oceans in multiple, inter-related ways. First the very material basis of drinking was dependent on international exchanges: port, claret and other wines, and all the ingredients of punch were commodities traded across the Atlantic; so too were the drinking vessels and the materials necessary to craft them. Toasting was an act of self-definition and an affirmation of allegiance, loyalty or sympathy and, as such, was part of the repertoire of political expression, from Jacobitism and partisan strife in the early eighteenth century to revolutionary patriotism in Ireland and in the American colonies, and finally sympathy for the French Revolution.