| Summary: | This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the American Revolution shaped a popular transatlantic understanding of British loyalism, focusing on the four port cities spanning the North Atlantic: New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland. During the early stages of the revolution, a shared transatlantic understanding of what it meant to be British in these four communities initially crumbled in the face of the Patriots' assertion that their cause was rooted in a defense of Protestant British liberty. Patriot arguments led loyal Britons in these places to question what defined their attachment to the empire. Out of these crises there emerged a new understanding of loyalism rooted in a strengthened defense of monarchy and duly constituted government. After the Franco-American alliance of 1778, loyal Britons were also able to reclaim their belief in the supremacy of Protestant British liberty, which they contrasted with the alleged tyranny of American Patriots and their French Catholic allies. Ultimately, the British loyalism as it developed in the wake of the American war was more conservative and authoritarian, reaching its apogee in the reaction against the radicalism of the French Revolution and the despotism of Napoleon.
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