Maya Jasanoff’s new book Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World is high on my reading list. From what I have been able to tell, this book has the potential to be the definitive work on Loyalists during the American Revolution. Hopefully we will get a copy and be able to do a review here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
In the meantime, check out Linda Colley’s review at The Guardian. Here is a taste:
For a very long time, loyalists were often left out of patriotic American histories of the revolution. Or they were caricatured as upper-class Tory reactionaries, or – rather like the Jacobites – made the subject only of nostalgic antiquarianism. Maya Jasanoff’s achievement in this vivid, superbly researched and highly intelligent book is skilfully to weave together and supplement a mass of recent revisionist research on these men and women, and to analyse their complex roles and significance in the imperial and global history of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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