Experimental Blog #64

Comments on the books "Liberty's Exiles" - American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World and
"Edge of Empire" - Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East by Maya Jasanoff

Benedict Arnold returned to North America, Saint John, New Brunswick, to pursue "what he hoped would be a profitable commercial career." Apparently, before he did that he remarried, and he and his wife, Margaret Shippen, had 3 children, named Edward, Sophia, and George. All three of their children eventually went to India, and a Benedict Arnold's "half-Indian granddaughter", named Louisa Harriet Arnold, some years later went to Ireland and eventually "married a British architect in 1845."
This book, "Liberty's Exiles," also describes the ambiguous and early turbulent history of the founding and early developement of Freetown in Sierra Leone in 1792 by British sponsors for, and by, former American slaves, mostly from Birchtown and other places in Nova Scotia.

The scope of what is actually Maya Jasanoff's first book, "Edge of Empire", is quite vast and covers many very interesting histories of English and French imperial expansion, competition, and conflict in India, Egypt, and other places, mostly in the "East." Many of these many people and events, in spite of their great impact on the world, might be little, or even completely unknown to most Americans.