NewsScotsman.com: Book review: Liberty's exiles by Maya Jasanoff, By John MacKenzie
Liberty's Exiles
by Maya Jasanoff
Harper Press, 416pp, £30
Revolutions and rebellions, reprisals and refugees all come as a package. Eighteenth-century Scotland had good reasons to know this with two Jacobite revolts tearing at the social and cultural, political and physical fabric of the country. Jacobite r
ADVERTISEMENT efugees were scattered across Europe and the rest of the world. A few of them were indeed caught up in the American revolutionary upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s featured in this book. As is well known, for example, the celebrated Flora MacDonald backed the wrong side twice.
Liberty's Exiles is the first work to take a comprehensive look at the loyalists who hoped to overturn the ambitions of the so-called American patriots and keep the 13 colonies within the British Empire. For some time they had every reason to hope for success, with a mighty empire pitted against colonial tax dodgers, but they reckoned without the fervour of the rebels, the involvement of the French and the Spanish, and the incompetence of the British generals. As the war wound to its conclusion, the last redoubts of the British, the cities of Savannah, Charleston, and New York were filled with loyalists seeking to escape the mayhem and reprisals that would follow the withdrawal of the Hanoverian forces.
Most of them were white, but many were black, former slaves lured by offers of freedom in exchange for their adherence to the imperial cause. Surprisingly, perhaps, neither whites nor blacks were abandoned. Peace negotiators looked to their interests. Major evacuations were organised and the loyalists streamed out, to be dispersed to Nova Scotia and other Canadian colonies, the West Indies, the Bahamas, other parts of the British Empire and Britain itself. Some were victims of dispossession and dislocation twice over. They moved to East Florida, still a British colony, only to find it handed back to Spain as part of the peace. Many were soon on the move again.
History tends to be the record of the victors. The great American myth has always portrayed the revolutionary war as the triumph of liberty over tyranny, of a forward-looking idealism over an atavistic imperialism, of republican constitutionalism over monarchical cronyism. That myth has long been exploded and it is one of the many virtues of Jasanoff's book that she has no truck with it. Using a vast range of sources, she seeks a sympathetic understanding of the predicament of loyalists, who were interested in different sorts of freedoms, rival ideals, and often had a genuine commitment to a sense of British identity.
They often did so at huge personal loss.
Thus Jasanoff surveys the war itself as a war of ordeals as well as of ideals (as she neatly puts it). Using a technique in which she interleaves personal and family experiences with the grander narratives,
ADVERTISEMENTshe follows the loyalists through the period of genuine hope into their time of despair. Vividly describing both individual and collective predicaments, she follows them to England, Scotland, Canada, East Florida and the Bahamas, Jamaica, Sierra Leone in the case of many blacks, and even India as a professional destination for some members of elite families. .A few even fetched up in the recently founded New South Wales. Finally, she examines the American war of 1812 as, in some respects, a time of revenge for the loyalists. And she neatly sums up the varied fortunes of both white and black personalities caught up in the dangerous business of imperial loyalism.
Indeed, she often seems surprised at the liberality of the empire. Not only were about 60,000 loyalists evacuated and, to a certain extent, looked after, the London parliament appointed a compensation commission to examine the losses incurred by their flight. Appointed in July 1783, this commission sat for the next few years, ultimately awarding more than £3 million against claims of more than £10 million.
Awards ranged from a few paltry pounds to a princely £25,000 (though even the recipient of that sum was not satisfied). Many, lacking the receipts, legal documents, or the capacity to reach London, missed out. Yet even a few blacks received small amounts.
Such compensation often set loyalists on the move again, searching for new imperial roosts. Elizabeth and William Johnston, both from loyalist families in the colonies, resettled in Edinburgh, where William pursued his medical training. Later they moved to Jamaica, which proved highly damaging to the health of their children and to William himself. Ultimately, Elizabeth moved to Nova Scotia where she found, somewhat to her surprise, some peace. A more prominent Scot was the Earl of Dunmore, son of a notable Jacobite, who was in turn governor of New York, Virginia and later the Bahamas. An unpopular autocrat, he was a firm supporter of loyalist causes.
After her spirited accounts of all these striking events and the personalities caught up in them, Jasanoff's conclusions are not wholly new, but they are powerfully endorsed. The American revolutionary war created two new imperial systems. One was a republican empire which spread across a continent with very little in the way of the metropolitan restraints (which ultimately became democratic restraints) imposed from London upon British rule across the world. The American empire constituted one of the great acts of dispossession of world history, pushing aside native Americans, the so-called Indians, destroying their cultures and economies within a century
Indeed, some of those Indians, like the Mohawks and the Creeks, had themselves been loyalists of a sort, recognising - or at least imagining - that a future in a British empire might be marginally less dangerous than being subjected to the uninhibit
ADVERTISEMENT ed depredations of American settlers.
Many Mohawks moved to Canada. Many Creeks attempted relocation - or even the creation of an independent buffer state - but with little success. Meanwhile, the British Empire was transformed by the loyalist presence. Loyalists often carried with them a spirit of political dissidence which caused governors in Canada and the West Indies many problems. Faced with the memory of 1776 and its aftermath, the British sought the safety valve of legislative councils and ultimately the grander concept of the Durham report which would grant significant forms of self-government to Canada and other territories of settlement in the Empire.
With the American colonies lost, Canada, Australasia and southern Africa became more important to the British, while the imperial centre of gravity moved eastwards to India and elsewhere (although the loss of the colonies had little effect upon transatlantic trading).
In her first book, Edge of Empire, Jasanoff charted the connections between imperial conquest and the buying and looting of antiquities and works of art, which turned Britain into a global treasure trove. This book does not quite have the revelatory power and sheer panache of that remarkable debut, but it nonetheless offers strikingly extensive research, cool analysis, and elegant prose.
