Loyalty that cost lives

HISTORY tends to be written by the winners but Maya Jasanoff, professor of history at Harvard and author of the much-praised Edge of Empire that covered British and French experiences of empire in Egypt and India, has decided it is time to tackle the struggles of one set of losers.

In what she fairly claims to be “the first global history of the loyalist diaspora”, Jasanoff describes what happened to those who, because of their pro-British views, chose to depart the North American colonies that became the United States.

The loyalists were almost expunged from history, depicted by the Americans as Redcoats sent out from Britain, rather than — as was usually the case — their own neighbours. In reality, the War of Independence was as much a civil war as an anti-colonial one.