Scottish loyalism in the British Atlantic world

Abstract

ABSTRACT This group of essays explores the ways in which Scottish loyalists shaped and contributed to the British Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once thought of as a narrow and defensive conservative reaction to political change and external military threat, historians have recently recast loyalism as the embodiment of a disparate and multifaced identity embraced by those of different ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions, touching even those who claimed neutrality. By adopting an expanded geographical and chronological range, these essays investigate examples of loyalism and popular royalism carried by Scots at home and in the British Atlantic world, at the time of the Revolutionary War, and in the decades that followed. As these essays demonstrate, loyalism was a patriotism born out of the messiness of the political, social, and economic transformation of this world, one that was entwined with the expansion of democracy.