Global migration of American Loyalists following the Revolutionary War is a topic easily overlooked by scholars and educators as they trace the path of the victorious Patriot forces. However, at the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire, altering their new communities. Loyalists traveled to Canada, they sailed for Britain, they journeyed to the Bahamas and the West Indies; some ventured still farther afield, to Africa and India. Wherever they went, this voyage into exile was a trip into the unknown. In the 2015 George Rogers Clark Lecture, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the fate of the loyalist refugees and explains the worldview of those who chose to remain allegiant to the British crown.
About the Speaker
Maya Jasanoff is a professor of history at Harvard University and is the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005), Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011) and The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017).