Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775-1914 ed. by Allan Blackstock and Frank O’Gorman (review)

Allan Blackstock and Frank O’Gorman’s well-rounded volume covers Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India over the long nineteenth century and demonstrates the vitality, and many meanings of professing loyalty to the United Kingdom’s crowned regent. The editors attempt to move beyond “simplistic” readings by earlier radical historians who described loyalism as a reactionary force. Instead loyalism here is defined as “complex, fluid and multi-faceted” (p. 1) and adaptable to a variety of imperial contexts.

The editors remind us in their introduction that loyalism and nationalism did not begin as statist truisms, but emerged from a “long gestating history” (p. 5) that is closely tied to the dynastic battles of the Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians. As Jacqueline Hill notes in her chapter, all groups fought “not as rebels but in defense of the crown” (p. 82). Yet as a result of the sectarian Glorious Revolution, the triumphant strand of loyalism was inseparably linked to Protestantism’s victories over Catholic interests (indeed Catholics could not take oaths to the monarch before 1774). Thus the Protestant-Catholic divide would be a source of continuing conflicts in mixed-settlement zones of Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere, often making loyalists more passionate on the periphery of empire than in Britain.

Patriotism prior to the French Revolutionary Wars, meanwhile, largely focused upon opposing central (and especially executive) governmental power. Though the revolutionary and reform movements of the eighteenth century often appealed to the king as an intercessor, many suspected the crown of dispensing patronage or otherwise manipulating Parliament. Only in the reaction against the Revolution did patriotism and loyalism link to become defining features of the British imperial world. Katrina Navickas’ chapter on early nineteenth-century material culture argues that thereafter loyalist objects and ideas provided “a framework to understand and cope with the rapid processes of social and political change” (p. 46) that the empire faced.

As the British polity moved away from being a Protestant confessional state during the mid-nineteenth century, loyalism remained ardently anti-Catholic in nature. Beginning in 1795, Loyal Orange orders were established in northern Ireland in an initial attempt to counter the spread of the United Irishmen’s Presbyterian-Catholic alliance. Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild describe the movement as the re-purposing of British “Reformation ideology” while adding a “strong dose of Ulster experiences” (p. 67). Indeed the authors argue Ulster increasingly diverged from England’s religious path, where falling nineteenth-century church attendance had led to a corresponding drop in anti-Catholicism.

Such militant Protestantism spread across the Empire concurrently with the famine-induced Irish diaspora of the 1840s. Scott W. See explores the mid-century Orange Orders in the Canadian Maritimes, which continued to both rhetorically and sometimes physically battle Canadian Catholics despite strong government condemnation. Only slowly, as Mark G. McGowan shows, did Catholics successfully stake claim to a loyal “imperial citizenship,” (p. 202) transcending their religious identity. Richard P. Davis describes similar tensions in Australia, which reached a height in 1868 when a militant Catholic attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred by shooting him in the back during an official visit. The only partial exception explored in this volume was in New Zealand: Brad Patterson argues that although an “unswerving sense of obligation” to the empire was maintained, Orangist impulses were marginalized by a more civic loyalism “to which Jew or Catholic could equally subscribe” (p. 261).

Oliver Godsmark and William Gould take a different approach from previous chapters and examine the question of loyalism amongst the empire’s non-white subjects in colonial India. Focusing on the developing Indian nationalist movement, the authors see loyalty as “a dynamic process of political response to the changing conditions of imperial governance” (p. 263). Loyalism became a useful rhetoric to promote the rule of law, political reform, and social justice...