Michael Ray Taylor
Michael Ray Taylor, AFHEA is an Instructor of History in the Division of Arts and Sciences at LSU Eunice. He teaches courses in Western Civilisation and European History, with a focus on helping students understand how political ideas, religious movements, and cultural conflicts shaped the modern Atlantic world.
Taylor is an early Americanist whose research centres on eighteenth‑century British and American intellectual history, particularly the political and ideological legacy of Jacobitism. His work examines how defeated political movements continued to shape ideas of liberty, empire, and colonial identity in Britain and the American colonies. He recently submitted his doctoral dissertation at the University of Aberdeen, entitled "Liberty and the Liberalism of Defeat: The Liberal Jacobite Movement and its Influence on the American Colonies".
His research has been supported by seventeen grants and awards, including funding from the Templeton Foundation and Becas Santander. He has presented fifteen academic papers at conferences and institutions across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. His scholarship appears in leading journals in British and imperial history, with publications in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, The Scottish Historical Review, Eighteenth Century Scotland, and Scottish Church History.
Taylor holds a BA from Boyce College and an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he specialised in church history. He is an Associate Fellow of Advance HE and a Beattie Scholar at the University of Aberdeen. In addition to his research and teaching, he serves as Chair of the LSUE AI Subcommittee and as Director of the Baptist Collegiate Ministry, where he works at the intersection of pedagogy, ethics, and emerging technologies.
The University of Aberdeen & Louisiana State University at Eunice
Session
This paper catalogues how political ideas circulated across Europe and the British Empire, through channels shaped by repression and conditional belonging rather than openness. It focuses on Jacobitism after its failed risings in the 18th century, a defeated political movement whose adherents were persecuted in Britain and fled to Europe and the American colonies. In response to exile, Jacobites developed a distinctive strain of liberal political thought centred on liberty, religious toleration, property, and the accountability of authority. Jacobite liberalism contributed to the political vocabulary that later informed revolutionary debates in the Atlantic world, including those surrounding the American Revolution
Drawing on case studies from every nation in the British Isles, the paper traces how Jacobite ideas moved into colonial settings. It analyses figures such as James Edward Oglethorpe, who governed at the edge of the empire in Georgia, as well as figures such as Philip, First Duke of Wharton, who acted as a Jacobite agent in half a dozen nations across Europe. In all these cases, Jacobite‑inflected liberal principles were applied in societies marked by religious and racial diversity. Their political thought emerged from life under surveillance and constraint, offering a model of interconnection grounded in adaptation rather than triumph.
Situating these cases within a wider imperial frame highlights parallels with other early modern empires, including those in Asia, where belief and political loyalty were similarly constrained. Seen from this perspective, the British Empire appears less as a vehicle of forced integration than as a patchwork of regulated connections, in which defeated or marginal actors often played an outsized role in shaping political practice. Recovering the global afterlives of this defeated tradition complicates linear accounts of liberalism’s rise and reveals how ideas forged under conditions of loss and exclusion could nonetheless travel widely and exert lasting influence.