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When London Was Capital of America. By Julie Flavell. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. xii, 305 pp. $32.50, isbn 978-0-30013739-2.)
In many respects this study achieves its aim: a vivid re-creation of London as the capital city of the British in North America, as told through their lives. In reclaiming these histories, Julie Flavell reasserts what British colonists treated as a given: that London was their center of government, authority, and the arbiter of social life and fashion. Flavell opens with the world of Henry Laurens, busy in Charleston in 1771 with preparations to send his son Harry, age seven, to London. The history of the Laurens family in London occupies the next four chapters. Her subsequent chapters never entirely leave the Laurens's circle (in part a consequence of me closeness of the London American community), even though Flavell also introduces New Yorkers such as Stephen Sayre and numerous other remarkable colonialborn Londoners. This is both the strength and...