Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.

by Maya Jasanoff (Author), Maya Jasanoff (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2012

  $4.28

  `More than just a work of first-class scholarship, Liberty's Exiles is a deeply moving masterpiece that fulfils the historian's most challenging ambition: to revivify past experience.' Niall Ferguson

  Liberty's Exiles was shortlisted for the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.

  Early in the afternoon of 25 November 1783, the American Revolution was finally over; the British were gone, the patriots were back and a key moment inscribed itself in the annals of the emerging United States. Territorial independence from Great Britain had effectively begun.

  In 'Liberty's Exiles', Maya Jasanoff examines the realities of the end of the Revolution, through looking at the lives of the Loyalist refugees - those men and women who took Britain's side. She tells the story of Elizabeth Johnston from Savannah, whose family went on to settle in St Augustine, Scotland, Jamaica and Nova Scotia; Reverend Jacob Bailey, who fled from New England across rough seas to Canada with his family and little more than the clothes on his back; five-year-old Catherine Skinner - the daughter of a loyalist - who was trapped as a prisoner in her home, hiding from the gunshots of rebel raiders. Their experiences speak eloquently of a larger history of exile, mobility and the shaping of the British Empire in the wake of the American War.

  Beautifully written and rich with source material, 'Liberty's Exiles' is a history of the American Revolution unlike any before.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2011

  $3.26

  `More than just a work of first-class scholarship, Liberty's Exile's is a deeply moving masterpiece that fulfil's the historian's most challenging ambition: to revivify past experience.' Niall Fergusson

  On a November day in 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing British rule in the United States to an end. It was the greatest British imperial defeat in generations. None felt the loss more immediately than the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had remained loyal to Britain. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts, some sixty thousand loyalists decided to leave their homes and become refugees, to rebuild their shattered lives elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica and the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world.

  `Liberty's Exiles' tells, for the first time, the story of this extraordinary global diaspora - the most wide-ranging refugee crisis Britain had ever faced. Through painstaking archival research and vivid story-telling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff recreates the astonishing journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of loyalists like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, questing for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. David George, a black preacher born into slavery, found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario; while adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyal Cree Indian state in Florida. For all these figures and more it was the British Empire -not the United States - that held out the promise of `life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'.

  An exhilirating, personality-filled book, `Liberty's Exiles' is history at its finest.