Abstract
The crew and several of the passengers aboard the Josiah relied on the movement of goods across the Atlantic for their livelihoods, from Captain Thomas Lurting, whose ships carried tobacco, textiles, iron goods, and saddles, to the Maryland Friends, who shipped their tobacco to Atlantic ports, including London.1 When London Quakers partic- ipated in trans-Atlantic trade and merchant culture in the City of London, they navigated between the material world of their commercial interests and the spiritual world of their faith. Excluded from ecclesias- tical, military, and legal professions, Friends who sought employment became involved in business, including high-risk Atlantic trade.2 The late seventeenth century was an economic turning point in England, a ‘commercial revolution’ that defined trade in the years that followed,3 and foreign trade rose to a position where it ‘underpinned the wealth, health, and strength’ of England.4 Participation in this boom in trade lent Quakers an importance in London, as when Theodor Eccleston argued in 1694 for Quakers’ relief from legal persecution, that their ‘Trades and Industry advance the National Stock’. That Quaker ‘Indus- try in Trade, both at Sea and Land, brings Property to the Government, as well as others’ was an argument the Friends used in lobbying for the Affirmation Acts.5
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Notes
Peter Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650–17SO (London: Methuen, 1994) p. 16.
Jeremy Boulton, ‘Neighbourhood Migration in Early Modern London’, in Migration and Society in Early Modern England, Peter Clark and David Souden, eds (Hutchinson: London, 1987), pp. 107–47
Charles Leslie, The Snake in the Grass: Or, Satan Transform’d into an Angel of Light (London: Charles Broome, 1698)
Geoffrey Cantor, ‘Quakers in the Royal Society, 1660–1750’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 51(2) (1997), 175–93
Nicholas Magens, An Essay on Insurances, Explaining the Nature of Various Kinds of Insurance Practiced by the Different Commercial States of Europe, and Showing their Consistency or Inconsistency with Equity and the Public Good (London: J. Haberkom, 1755)
Michael P. Monis, The Bringing of Wonder: Trade and the Indians of the Southeast, 1700–1783 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 72.
George Fox, The Line of Righteousness and Justice Stretched Forth over All Merchants &c (London: Robert Wilson, 1661), p. 8
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© 2015 Jordan Landes
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Landes, J. (2015). Quaker Merchants and Trans-Atlantic Commercial Activity in London. In: London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366689_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366689_5
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