“Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World”, by Maya Jasanoff

 

480 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-1400041688

Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World is well-written and thoroughly researched but, when it comes to providing any new or revelatory information…eh, not so much. Oh, she deals fairly enough with those who opposed the American Revolution and their tales of woe as exiles in Canada, the British Isles, Nova Scotia and elsewhere across the length and breadth of the British Empire, but I found it all to be rather tired. One can feel sorry for these non-revolutionaries alright, principally because of the many unkept promises made by His Majesty’s government but, frankly, they never generated sympathy from me as I did not believe in their (un)cause. I will say, however, that Jasanoff has provided, perhaps, the first synthetic overview of the history of these poor, poor loyalists, for while there really is nothing new in her scholarship, she has managed to compile in a single sours some 80 years’ worth of scholarship on these Never-Wanted-To-Be-Americans.

But perhaps they should not be too pitied, as these Not-Yankees raised a pretty serious stink in their new homes around the empire upon which the sun never set, especially in the Bahamas, where their schemes to transplant their cotton empires floundered and their racism made everyone’s lives hell, while Canada was never the same when these similar but still-different colonials showed up with their familiar but still-strange attitudes. And they never stopped planning to overthrow the newly independent US of A or plotting any number of outlandish schemes, like independent Indian nations and whatnot (which wasn’t a priority when they were still colonists, funnily enough). So anyway, Liberty’s Exiles retells an oft-told tale well without really adding anything new to the mix, while also bringing these tales together in one single source. Sooooo…okay.