Almost from the moment that William of Orange landed on the Devon coast on 5 November 1688, Jacobitism – support for James ii&vii and his immediate heirs – captured the imagination of Britons including those located both within and beyond the shores of the British archipelago. Preachers in London and Boston condemned rebels or defended hereditary right while newspapers and pamphlets circulating throughout the English-speaking world kept nervous readers apprised of events. The flight of James ii&vii to France and the subsequent coronation of William and Mary created within the various political entities previously ruled by the Stuarts fault lines between Jacobites and their opponents that were to last for well over half a century. From 1688 to 1746 Jacobites sought to restore the Stuart dynasty through various means, including civil wars in Scotland and Ireland, conspiracies and rebellions in 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745. Yet it is often forgotten that in the early eighteenth century residents in what were then the English (and later British) colonies on the east coast of North America were also primarily Britons. Thus, these events were profoundly important to those living in remote areas across the Atlantic. Nor was it interest alone that was geographically unconstrained. Political and religious divisions were replicated across the British Atlantic world, so much so that one contemporary considered them to be ‘an echo to that on the other side’.

The argument of this book is two-fold. First, that Jacobitism and anti- Jacobitism were integral facets of the cultural totality of Britain's Atlantic empire in the early eighteenth century and, as such, were significant elements in transatlantic political culture, religious controversies and the public sphere in the British Atlantic world from 1689 to 1727, that is from the accession of William and Mary to the demise of the first Hanoverian, George i. Second, that Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism played an important role in the anglicisation of the British Atlantic. In so doing, it illustrates a dynamic transatlantic political culture and sheds light on how Britain's budding empire came to encompass a cohesive and anglicised, yet still heterogeneous, transatlantic political and religious culture. This book is therefore a study of anglicisation writ large.