Liberty's Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire. [Hardcover]

This is an important book, which brings new perspective to both the American Revolution and the development of the British Empire. Jasanoff has an infelicitous writing style, but this is largely compensated by her intelligent analysis, her storyteller's gift and her liberal quotation of sources that provide direct access to the voices of her many characters.

"Liberty's Exiles" examines the fate of those inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies- Black and Indian as well as colonist, women as well as men - who defied the American Revolution to remain loyal to Great Britain. Jasanoff estimates that between a fifth and a third of the population remained loyalist. Many took up arms for the Crown. Afterwards, some sixty thousand fled their homes to become refugees and settlers anew in the rest of the Empire.

Jasanoff's first point is that the American Revolution was also America's first civil war. The American born protagonists were "more alike than any other enemies they faced." As in most civil wars, the contest was fought with considerable vindictiveness on both sides - George Washington was an especially unrelenting persecutor of loyalists, a revelation here that has diminished my overall view of him. When the war was done, many of the states ignored their obligations under the Treaty of Paris to reintegrate loyalists and confiscated their property and applied harsh loyalty tests. Many were driven out.

Jasanoff tracks the exodus of the loyalist diaspora both analytically and through the stories of individuals and families, such as the Robinsons, a prolific settler family under their matriarch, Beverly, David George, a freed slave, and Joseph Brant a Mohawk Indian. The stories are surprisingly modern - a form of ideological cleansing, large displacements of people, hastily assembled evacuation plans, Claims Commissions examining the right to compensation, families split up and moving to different geographies. Many refugees moved several times, such as Blacks who ended up in Freetown in Sierra Leone, or whites who first moved to East Florida only to find that the King had ceded the territory to the Spanish, or Indians who found that the white man's word was sound only as long as he was distracted by other avenues of plunder. Jasanoff dwells in detail on those who returned to Great Britain and re-settled in what is now Canada and in the exceptionally wealthy, slave-owning and disease prone Caribbean.

If the American Revolution created the context in which to begin the world again, in Paine's phrase, it also refired the British Empire. New energies were put into building an Empire in India, Southeast Asia, Australia and Africa to compensate for the loss of the Thirteen Colonies. Cornwallis died not as the disgraced architect of the loss of America but as a respected Governor-General of India. For the next 150 years the expansion of the Empire was as strong a geopolitical force as the development of the United States.

The loyalist migrants not only provided a demographic boost to Empire but also provided an "enduring framework for the principles and practices of British rule." The refugees may have remained loyal to the crown but they shared much of their former compatriots' desire for individual freedoms and rights. They thus contributed much to the evolution of the combination of liberal values and top down governance that characterized the next phase of Empire and the eventual emergence of the Dominion model in the settler-based colonies. Jasanoff traces this "spirit of 1783" and makes a convincing case for its historical importance.

Jasanoff tells a powerful story, enlivened with numerous anecdotes about individual migrants from all reaches of society and plum-puddinged with quotations from her sources. She is an intelligent writer, drawing many insights and successfully telling the larger story even as she conveys the human experience of real individuals.

However, her writing style needs work. She over-crams her prose with information, loading subordinate clauses on already over-burdened sentences. Mere full stops cannot contain her torrent: many sentences and quite a few paragraphs begin with And, For and But.. She is addicted to clichés and received expressions such as "grim satisfaction" and "stunning successes." _- I counted eight of these in just one paragraph for example. She can shift abruptly from an academic voice to the colloquial. I did find that this detracted from my pleasure in reading this otherwise excellent book.This intelligent and curious author is well capable of overcoming this weakness if she decides that it is important to do so. I look forward to her next book.

I bought this to get a good background to the exodus of my American GGGgrandmother to Canada after the American War of Independance - The First American Civil War.

It is a brilliant and sad record of the period of the hardship of many Loyalists who were forced to leave their homes and country after backing the loosing side. The winners generally come out really badly as vindictive and grasping. Don't forget that it was the Patriots who committed the war crimes - unlike the movie versions)

Google for a comprehensive reviw by expert historians.

This is an exceptional book, not for its writing style, which is painful, but for its content, which is highly-original and ground-breaking. The breadth and depth of the author's research is remarkable- it is hard to believe that so much written evidence survives from a period of such turmoil, not just for loyalist whites , but for native Indians and freed slaves as well. A researcher's tour-de-force.
This is part of the problem: the first hundred pages, which deal with the period of the Revolution itself, are VERY hard work, but once we get to the personal experiences of the loyalist refugees, the story comes to life.
Jasanoff has several messages: the "Spirit of 1783" was the basis of the future growth of the British Empire; the British learnt (eventually) from their mistakes in America, by ruling with a lighter touch and lower taxation- with the more liberal diaspora to remind them; a sense of community became more important than nationality- demonstrated by the fact that, in the 1812 war, many Americans who had emigrated to canada (for land grants.... and lower taxation!!) remained actively loyal to the Crown; and the American patriots, particularly Washington, were cruel, vindictive and guilty of war crimes (repeated in 1812), failing to re-integrate or compensate the loyalists for their losses.