This concluding chapter describes how, in Britain's postwar Atlantic empire, subjects in the four colonial port cities voiced a greater commitment to monarchical government, but they also expressed a more determined defense of the rights and liberties they enjoyed. When viewed through the wider lens of the British Atlantic, this renewed embrace of Britishness also sits in tension with a diversity of local political cultures that were defined, in part, by their resident's revolutionary experiences. Britons in these four communities often made sense of the debates surrounding this period, of questions of rights and liberties and what constituted tyranny, from distinct local perspectives. Of course, such differences did not originate in the 1760s and 1770s, nor were they previously incompatible with broader characterizations of British loyalty and loyalism. But the events of this period forced these disparities into the open in ways previously unknown. Ultimately, there was little that actually bound together Britain's Atlantic empire. The actions of rebellious Americans certainly confirmed this point, but it was just as true of loyal Britons.
The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution