subsequent loss of the American Revolutionary War. At the time, Great Britain and its overseas empire were ruled by the German-descended King George III, who was also the Prince-Elector of Hanover, a state in what is now northwestern Germany. Notably, a number of soldiers fighting on what modern historiography terms the pro-British side of the conflict were members of regiments hired from various small German states. These soldiers were collectively known as "Hessians", since many of them came from Hesse. Following the defeat of British forces in the Revolutionary War, about 2,200 of them settled in Canada once their terms of service had expired or they had been released from American captivity. For example, a group from the Brunswick Regiment settled southwest of Montreal and south of Quebec City. In this, they formed part of a larger population movement composed of several waves of migration northward from the newly-founded United States to Upper and Lower Canada. In traditional Canadian historiography, these migrants are often grouped together under the broad label of United Empire Loyalists, obscuring particular ethnic and religious identities, as well as their exact motivations for migrating to Canada. Another broad grouping of migrants were religious nonconformists, such as Quakers, Mennonites, and "Dunkers", who preferred British rule for religious reasons. These groups were formed on the basis of belief rather than ethnicity, but a number had their origin in Germany or in ethnic German communities in places such as Pennsylvania. These people are sometimes referred to by the Anglicized term "Pennsylvania Dutch", which derives from the endonym . This term has led to their confusion with modern-day Dutch people. For this reason, some historiographers such as George Elmore Reaman use the term "Pennsylvania German", in order to distinguish them from migrants originating in Holland. Another complicating factor in assigning definite ethnic identities or origins to many migrants is that a number spent sometimes as long as several generations living in intermediary places such as Pennsylvania, New York, Holland, or England, despite an ultimate origin in Germany. One example is the Irish Palatines, who originated in the Palatinate (today a part of Germany) but had been settled for a time in Ireland by the British Crown. The largest group fleeing the United States was the Mennonites. Many of their families' ancestors had been from southern Germany or Switzerland. In the early 1800s, they began to move to what is now