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

Jasanoff, Maya

3.95

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9780007180080: Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 000718008X ISBN 13: 9780007180080

Publisher: HarperPress, 2011

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‘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.

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Review:

"Liberty's Exiles is book which in scope and originality, global reach and research, intellectual curiosity and sheer provocative panache – upturning in its wake whole apple-carts of unchallenged assumptions –can sustain comparison with Linda Colley or the young Simon Schama. The truth is that Maya Jasanoff is not just a very good writer, an indefatigable researcher and a fine historian, she is also a bit of a genius." William Dalrymple

"Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles places the loyalist experience and the aftermath of the American Revolution in an entirely new light. Alongside the Spirit of 1776, Jasanoff gives us the Spirit of 1783, dedicated to remaking the mighty British Empire, and then offers a stunning reinterpretation of the loyalists' complicated role in that remaking. Her meticulously researched and superbly written account is historical revision at its finest, and it affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation." Sean Wilentz

“a fascinating subject...the story comes alive most vividly through the experiences of those few who left diaries, letters, memoirs” The Times

“Jasanoff’s achievement in this vivid, superbly researched and high intelligent book is to skilfully weave together a mass of recent revisionist research on these men and women” The Guardian

“For the first time, a work of history follows in detail the diaspora of assorted slaves, colonists, American Indians and redcoats who threw in their lot with Britain and lost. Jasanoff undertakes a substantial revision of the received account of the war...her bold thesis is laid out with cast-iron sensibleness and a strong dose of humanity” The TImes

About the Author:

Maya Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including the Economist, Guardian and Sunday Times. Her second, Liberty’s Exiles was shortlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize (now Baillie Gifford). A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the prestigious 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.

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