When London Was Capital of America

“Ambitious . . . lively. . . . Beautifully reimagining a city that was a distant but integral part of American life, Flavell’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the colonial period.”—Andrea Wulf, New York Times Book Review

A Wall Street Journal “Summer Reading” Selection

“Flavell’s study offers wonderfully evocative glimpses into the lives of men such as Benjamin Franklin, who lived in the city for 17 years.”—The Guardian

“[A] well-researched and enjoyable book.”—Leslie Mitchell, Literary Review

“[An] engaging social history, written with a novelist’s eye for character and plot.”— Gaiutra Bahadur, The Observer

“Flavell re-creates with stunning lucidity the bustling world of Georgian London. . . . Absorbing. . . . Remarkable. . . . Through meticulous research and elegant prose, she brings to life a city at the height of its powers.”—Brian Odom, Library Journal

“The book is written in a very accessible style laced with familiar literary parallels drawn from such authors as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and likely to attract the non-specialist reader. . . . But for all of its seeming lightness of touch, Flavell’s work is based on thorough research and has some serious and important messages for historians of the revolutionary period."—Stephen Conway, American Historical Review

“Flavell offers a lively, informative account of individual Americans in London and firmly establishes the enduring attractions of the capital for colonials of varied stripes, both before and after American independence.”—Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Age of Johnson

“A wonderful evocation of the full panorama and panoply of life in eighteenth-century London.”—Andrew O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided

“With clarity and sure authority, Julie Flavell tells us challenging things that will cast new light on the many readers’ commonly-held beliefs. This is a splendid book.”—Peter Marshall

“A fascinating account of Americans in London in the 1760s and 1770s. Julie Flavell ingeniously weaves together the experiences of the Laurens family of South Carolina, Stephen Sayre of Long Island, and Benjamin Franklin, plus many other colonists, to reveal the rich variety of their London life, and she also illuminates the growing tensions of the revolutionary crisis in strikingly new ways.”—Richard S. Dunn, author of Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713

“Before Americans had a Washington—or any other capital city worthy of the name—they had London. Taking as her subject the men and women, young and old, enslaved and free, high-born and humble, who crossed the Atlantic in the years just before and during the Revolution, Julie Flavell paints a vivid and compelling picture of London as the cultural, political, and economic center of colonial American life.”—Eliga H. Gould, author of The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution