Quakers and Abolition
This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition.
Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history.
Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
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Brycchan Carey is a reader in English literature at Kingston University, London, and the author of Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761.
Geoffrey Plank is a professor of history at the University of East Anglia and the author of John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire.
"A nicely balanced volume in every way, important not only for what it covers but also for how it will inspire future students of Quakers and race. These essays encourage other scholars to reexamine Quakers and their interracial activism, while suggesting a variety of useful new perspectives and tools."
--Allan W. Austin, author of Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950
"The editors write in their introduction that they hope 'the essays offered here will raise as many questions as they answer and encourage further research' (p. 10). They succeed admirably in this goal, presenting a strong collection of essays that leave one inspired to learn more."--The North Carolina Historical Review"This work provides a more complete understanding of the diversity and complexity of historical Quaker responses to slavery/anti-slavery."--Choice
"This book. . .. puts on the table numerous richly detailed pieces of the puzzle that is Quakers antislavery. The essays are a pleasure to read, both individually and as a group, and they are indicative of the exciting directions in which scholarship at the intersection of Quaker and abolitionist historiography might be headed."--Civil War Book Review
"An excellent overview of recent scholarship on Quaker antislavery and introduces readers to several new topics for future analysis. . . . the book should be of interest to those long familiar with this subject as well as to a broader audience seeking to understand the influence of the Quakers' religious experience on the antislavery movement."--The Journal of American History "The book is remarkably transatlantic (in its contributors and its subjects) and will serve to expand and enrich our analyses of the British and American antislavery movement(s)."--American Studies
