The American Revolution was a cathartic event in world history. What we might not have realized until now was how much it transformed the nature of the British Empire. Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire, argues that the revolution and the exile of more than 60,000 individuals from American soil to the far reaches of British domains transformed political culture, social dynamics and even imperial forms of administration. As a whole, this colonial diaspora and the catharsis of the Revolution formed what Jasanoff coined as “the spirit of 1783.” One of the main arguments of the book is that this ideal guided the restructuration of the British Empire with more sights for expansion, “a clarified
