The Jacobites are usually ranked among history's great losers. For decades after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they were supporters of the deposed, Catholic, exiled line of Britain's Stuart royal family throughout Britain and Ireland and the British colonies. On occasion they received material support from France and other continental European powers, but their intrigues and uprisings repeatedly failed, and they had mostly receded from politics by the end of 1750s. None the less, they helped to transform British politics and, as David Parrish demonstrates in this important book, their influence spread across the empire.

Jacobites are difficult to study, especially in colonial America. They met in secret and communicated in code, and though Jacobites managed to rally militarily in Ireland in 1689 and in Britain in 1715 and 1745, they never mustered in the colonies. None the less, through careful detective work, Parrish has found evidence of Jacobite influence in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina and other colonies between 1688 and 1727. Ironically, he demonstrates that the effect of their activities was not to weaken the authority of William and Mary, Anne or George i. Instead the presence of Jacobites drew the colonies closer to Britain politically by connecting local, colonial debates with British partisan contests pitting Tories against Whigs.

In the first three chapters of his book Parrish concentrates on evidence of Jacobitism in colonial party politics, religious controversy and the public sphere. His analysis of party politics rightly emphasises the partisan battles over royal appointments, and the direct influence of British Tories and Whigs on the direction of colonial policy. His discussion of religion emphasises the demographic weakness of the Church of England and the variety of colonial religious groups that were suspected of gravitating toward Jacobitism. In his analysis of the public sphere he shows how Jacobites communicated in code. In his last three chapters he examines case studies, focusing in turn on South Carolina, the Mid-Atlantic colonies and New England. Though these chapters involve many actors, they focus on important characters, like Edward Marston, an Anglican minister in Charlestown, South Carolina, and his Scottish ally Thomas Nairne, on Governor Robert Hunter of New York, and on John Checkley, a ‘High Church Anglican Tory layman’ in Boston. This combination of thematic chapters and case studies allows Parrish to present his evidence for the existence of Jacobitism systematically, and he makes a convincing case for the pervasiveness of Jacobite influence in several colonies. But the structure of his book has limitations. There are links between the stories that he tells in different chapters that beg to be teased out.

To cite one example particularly interesting to me, in chapters i and ii Parrish stresses the perceived links between Quakerism and Jacobitism. He tells us that the governor or New York, Richard Bellomont, suspected that many Jacobites pretended to be Quakers in order to avoid taking the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Parrish also tells us that William Penn was ‘likely’ a Jacobite and he notes that many other Quakers were suspected of similar sympathies because of their refusal to swear allegiance or support William and Mary's war against France. By contrast, in chapter v, on the middle colonies, Parrish identifies High Church Anglicans as the core constituency of Jacobitism, and he examines the ways in which they targeted Quakers. In 1716 it was widely suspected that Jacobite conspirators plotted to set fire to the Quaker Meeting House in Burlington, New Jersey. The juxtaposition of these discussions raises obvious questions that Parrish has not given himself space to answer: when and how did the position of the Quakers change?

Parrish's chapter structure makes it difficult for him to comprehensively examine the impact of big events on an imperial scale. The creation of the United Kingdom in 1707, in particular, deserves more attention. Though recently historians have emphasised that Jacobitism had support in a variety of British constituencies, from 1689 onward Scotland was always suspected of being a stronghold for the Jacobites, and the union brought Scots in much greater numbers to America. The Scots were divided among themselves, and not in simple, predictable ways. Scottish Episcopalians were frequently attracted to Jacobitism in Britain, but in the colonies, as Ned Landsman has shown, they sometimes clashed bitterly with High Church Anglicans. I suspect that the Scottish story in the colonies, like the Quaker one, is complicated. To be fully elucidated it needs focused, narrative treatment. Parrish has laid the groundwork for further study on this topic. Anyone interested in Jacobitism in America should mine this book.