Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America

The process of leaving a customs union is immensely complicated and time-consuming, as some politicians have belatedly discovered in post-Brexit Britain. Similarly, the thirteen colonies’ decision to depart from the customs union of the British mercantilist state led to a realization that political independence did not sever economic ties across the Atlantic with the new country’s major trading partner and financier. Despite its defeat in 1783, the British Empire remained expansive and dynamic, and American businessmen needed to maintain links. And not unlike the situation in post-Brexit Britain, the issue of citizenship hung in the balance. The more common story is how British immigrants became American despite their supposed “perpetual allegiance” to the sovereign. Yet, another issue, which is at the core of Tuffnell’s book, is that the continued economic ties across the Atlantic led to expatriate communities of Americans whose status and loyalty remained in question. Were they informal...