Maya Jasanoff. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
The American Revolution was also, in many ways, a civil war. This was likely especially true for the loyalist minority, who experienced the war as a betrayal of their own sense of British identity. Loyalists, Jasanoff shows, were not the conservative reactionaries of contemporary rhetoric or posthumous remembrance. Instead, they often took views on the relationship between provincial subjects and the British government which were remarkably similar to that staked out by the Patriot Whigs. What defined them, ultimately, was loyalty not conservatism.
This study of the roughly 60,000 loyalists--white, free black, and American Indian--who chose to leave the newly independent United States in the wake of the 1783 Treaty traces their exodus around the growing, changing British Empire--what became Canada, the Bahamas, East Florida, Jamaica, Britain itself, Sierra Leone, India--it was a global diaspora, and often involved multiple stops before the exiles (not a few of whom ultimately returned to a United States which by fits and starts became more welcoming to its prodigal subjects-turned-citizens).
By 1815, this process was largely over--the exiles who were still alive were largely dead. During the roughly 30 years of exile, the loyalists had played an outsized role in the creation of a new British Empire, and had also been part of a larger process of constitutional and political development. The British Empire, in contrast to the Republicanism of the United States and France on the one hand, and the despotism of so many other powers on the other, would be marked by a peculiarly British form of liberal, paternal imperialism. The loyalist exiles contributed greatly to this development.
By studying the loyalists and following them after most American histories turn away from them, the American Revolution and the development of early American Republican citizenship can be seen in a new light, in contrast to the loyalist exile experience as they struggled to find new homes in the empire they gave up so much in order to remain loyal to.
