Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic by Brad A. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic by Brad A. Jones Liam Riordan Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic. By Brad A. Jones. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. 330 pages. Cloth, ebook. Brad A. Jones’s Resisting Independence joins Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles as the best of the recent wave of scholarship answering some of the most fundamental questions often overlooked in the vast scholarship about the American Revolution—who were the loyalists, why did they oppose the rebellion that created the United States, and why is understanding them significant? Jones focuses on popular loyalism as revealed in print culture and deploys an effective comparative analysis of four major port cities across the British Empire: New York City, Halifax, Glasgow, and Kingston. This unique selection provides a rich perspective on the British Atlantic, as Jones extends J. G. A. Pocock’s keen insights about how colonial spaces far from London made potent contributions to the meaning of “Britishness.”1 Jones achieves this by fruitfully expanding his subject to include loyalists beyond those who directly engaged rebels in the thirteen colonies that became the United States. Instead, loyalism here is a mode of conceiving and expressing Britishness in the period of significant transition from the 1760s to the 1780s, an ideological and social formation that has not been well understood due to an overemphasis on American patriots and the French Revolution. The book is well researched and skillfully written and makes several valuable revisionist arguments. Most importantly, Jones contends that popular loyalism was less authoritarian than the loyalism of British officialdom that other scholars have emphasized as a key element driving change in late eighteenth-century British imperialism, especially as part of the much-debated shift from the first to the second British Empire.2 For Jones, the historiographical emphasis on what the French Revolution meant for Britishness has overshadowed critical earlier developments, and he argues that the American Revolution spurred loyalists throughout the empire “to embrace a renewed commitment [End Page 154] to monarchy and empire and a more determined defense of their rights as British subjects” (13). A vigorous rights-based mobilization was thus not the sole province of patriots, and loyalists championed meaningful legislative reform to increase local representation and stressed the close ties between British liberty and Protestantism. The book’s revisionism is also displayed through its valuable corrective to the heavy emphasis often placed on loyalists as postwar refugees. In chapters 2 and 3, Jones argues that as early as the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, loyalism tested and changed what it meant to be British. His recasting of the Stamp Act’s repeal as “the final moments of a united British Atlantic” (43), rather than as the prologue to revolution, revealingly upends a foundational patriot teleology. He compellingly assesses imperial political culture in this period, carefully attending to how Britishness united people as well as to how local circumstances fueled differences; as he puts it, “the resurgence of British Loyalism . . . was both unifying and inherently fragile” (11). For example, Catholicism appears throughout Jones’s book as a persistent foil essential to the forging of Britishness, but the toleration established by the Quebec Act of 1774 strengthened the rebellion, as patriots effectively condemned imperial actions as pro-Catholic. The loyalist cause was also weakened in these early years by the characterization of rank-and-file rebels as fellow Britons who had been duped by a cabal of self-interested and self-proclaimed patriots. Because this interpretation imputed shallow roots to the rebellion, loyalists did not seem to need mass mobilization or severe retribution to prevail. The start of the war transformed this dynamic and shapes the key turning points and organization of the last half of the book—chapter 4 examines the outbreak of war, chapter 5 investigates its early years, and chapters 6 and 7 analyze events following the critical Franco-American alliance of 1778, whose impact “on popular conceptions of Britishness,” for Jones, is “impossible to overstate” (203). The conclusion examines local responses in the four port cities to the major British victory at the Battle of the Saintes in April...