Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785-1810 - Softcover

One of the most impressive achievements of Atlantic Loyalties is to establish a road map for studying West Florida in particular and the southern borderlands in general. McMichael offers an important counterpart to the standard narrative of the system of British slavery that began in the upper South before heading South and West. Instead, we learn about a more complex and dynamic process through which enslavement and freedom, plantation agriculture and frontier settlement, regional connections and international tensions overlapped to shape life in North America.

McMichael's book is a powerful argument for writing borderlands history from the ground up, concentrating on what actually happened in a given place and fitting that place into an Atlantic framework. The story of Anglo-American expansion into the Spanish borderlands has traditionally been told as the inevitable triumph of English liberty over Spanish tyranny. In this pathbreaking study, McMichael shows that government in the Baton Rouge district of West Florida was enlightened and mild and that Anglo settlers, whose allegiance was more practical than patriotic, were content to live under Spanish law as long as Spain was able to grant lands and protect property.

Atlantic Loyalties is the finest book written on the southern borderlands. Focusing upon an obscure region the Baton Rouge district of West Florida, he has carefully chronicled the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that gave context to the lives and loyalties of the French, Spanish, British, and American settlers. This is a revolutionary book that moves easily between the local and the international, revealing the shifting loyalties and abiding self-interest of the settlers.

Offers exceptionally well written, interesting, and innovative approaches that promise to breathe new interpretive life into what many may consider an old topic . . . As one of the stronger anthologies in the field published in recent years, this collection will be useful to specialists and students alike . . . the range of interpretations and the nuanced understandings of American slavery will certainly benefit scholars for years to come.

[Andrew] McMichael does a good job of describing the operations and end of twenty-five years of Spanish rule in West Florida. He uses a rich variety of archival sources to illustrate and establish his key points. This is bottom-up history that takes into account theoretical themes but is ever on the search for concrete evidence on which to base the more abstract claims. Others would do well to imitate his work.

Atlantic Loyalties does an excellent job in placing West Florida into an international context. . . . An interesting book that sheds historical light on an area all-too-often downplayed or not mentioned at all.