Piers Brendon
For King and Countries
Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire
By Maya Jasanoff
HarperPress 460pp £30 order from our bookshop
In the hot summer of 1775 a young man called Thomas Brown, who had recently emigrated from England to establish a large plantation near Augusta in Georgia, confronted an angry mob on the porch of his mansion. They demanded that he should throw in his lot with the American revolutionaries. He refused, saying that he did not want to fight his neighbours but that he ‘could never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being’.
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