Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

By telling the “stories of ordinary people whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events” (14), showing the diverse trajectories of loyalist refugees, and tracing points of commonality and contrast to discern key themes of the loyalist diaspora as a single phenomenon, Jasanoff shows “the worldwide consequences of the revolution in a completely new way” (11). Her book sets a precedent for other historians undertaking the neglected study of the loyalist diaspora as a global phenomenon that profoundly influenced the British Empire.

The author contextualizes her scholarship distinctly within the scantness of similar research; her work is fulfilling an unmet historiographic need. A handful of previous “studies have looked at specific figures and sites within this migration,” but “the international displacement of loyalists during and after the war has never been described in full” (10). Ideological reasons contributed to this paucity of research. American historians emphasized the role of patriots in the American Revolution as victors and gave little attention to their loyalist counterparts, whose stories “fell outside the bounds of American national narratives” (10). British historians considered the loyalist diaspora a reminder of an embarrassing defeat. Canadian historians have done more to study loyalists, but in ways that conflated loyalists with Canadian conservatives, which “reaffirmed the ‘tory’