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Prior to the Quakers' large scale migration to Pennsylvania, Barbados had more Quakers than any other English colony. But on this island of sugar plantations, Quakers confronted material temptations and had to temper founder George Fox's admonitions regarding slavery with the demoralizing realities of daily life in a slave based economy one where even most Quakers owned slaves. In The Quaker Community on Barbados, Larry Gragg shows how the community dealt with these contradictions as it struggled to change the culture of the richest of England's seventeenth century colonies. Gragg has conducted meticulous research on two continents to re create the Barbados Quaker community. Drawing on wills, censuses, and levy books along with surviving letters, sermons, and journals, he tells how the Quakers sought to implement their beliefs in peace, simplicity, and equality in a place ruled by a planter class that had built its wealth on the backs of slaves. He reveals that Barbados Quakers were a critical part of a transatlantic network of Friends and explains how they established a ¿counterculture¿ on the island one that challenged the practices of the planter class and the class's dominance in island government, church, and economy. In this compelling study, Gragg focuses primarily on the seventeenth century when the Quakers were most numerous and active on Barbados. He tells how Friends sought to convert slaves and improve their working and living conditions. He describes how Quakers refused to fund the Anglican Church, take oaths, participate in the militia, or pay taxes to maintain forts and how they condemned Anglican clergymen, disrupted their services, and wrote papers critical of the established church. By the 1680s, Quakers were maintaining five meetinghouses and several cemeteries, paying for their own poor relief, and keeping their own records of births, deaths, and marriages. Gragg also tells of the severe challenges and penalties they faced for confronting and rejecting the dominant culture. With their civil disobedience and stand on slavery, Quakers on Barbados played an important role in the early British Empire but have been largely neglected by scholars. Gragg's work makes their contribution clear as it opens a new window on the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world.
This landmark volume is the first in a century to examine the “Second Period” of Quakerism, a time when the Religious Society of Friends experienced upheavals in theology, authority and institutional structures, and political trajectories as a result of the persecution Quakers faced in the first decades of the movement’s existence. The authors and special contributors explore the early growth of Quakerism, assess important developments in Quaker faith and practice, and show how Friends coped with the challenges posed by external and internal threats in the final years of the Stuart age—not only in Europe and North America but also in locations such as the Caribbean. This groundbreaking collection sheds new light on a range of subjects, including the often tense relations between Quakers and the authorities, the role of female Friends during the Second Period, the effect of major industrial development on Quakerism, and comparisons between founder George Fox and the younger generation of Quakers, such as Robert Barclay, George Keith, and William Penn. Accessible, well-researched, and seamlessly comprehensive, The Quakers, 1656–1723 promises to reinvigorate a conversation largely ignored by scholarship over the last century and to become the definitive work on this important era in Quaker history. In addition to the authors, the contributors are Erin Bell, Raymond Brown, J. William Frost, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Robynne Rogers Healey, Alan P. F. Sell, and George Southcombe.
The Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, are well known for their antislavery philosophy in the United States prior to the Civil War. During the 17th century, however, many Quakers owned plantations in the colony of Barbados and reaped the profits of sugar harvested and produced through slave labor. The engagement of Barbadian Quakers with the institution of slavery caused the group to negotiate between their Christian values and the dominant economic model of their society. This study explores the development of the Quaker philosophy concerning slavery while members of the denomination participated in the slave society of Barbados. It argues that as members of the sect became increasingly involved with slavery, a body of rhetoric was produced by prominent Quakers that positioned the group in opposition to the ruling planter class, but was not yet antislavery. Also, the actions of the Quakers in response to the rhetoric about slavery signify that the sect was moving toward to position that was emphatically antislavery, but that position was not fully realized until after the height of Quaker influence in Barbados. The Society of Friends migrated away from the Caribbean in the late 1600s and carried with them ideas and convictions that developed into abolitionist philosophy in the subsequent centuries.
This book explores the Society of Friend's Atlantic presence through its creation and use of networks, including intellectual and theological exchange, and through the movement of people. It focuses on the establishment of trans-Atlantic Quaker networks and the crucial role London played in the creation of a Quaker community in the North Atlantic.
Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.
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.
How can the small, isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand the early expansion of English America? First discovered by Europeans in 1505, the island of Bermuda had no indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years before Plymouth, Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization. Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential colonial development as a place where slave-owning puritan tobacco planters raised large families, engaged overseas markets, built ships, created a Christian commonwealth, hanged witches, wrestled to define racial difference, and welcomed godly pirates raiding Spanish America. In Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints, Michael J. Jarvis presents readers with a new narrative social and cultural history of Bermuda. Adopting a holistic, multidisciplinary approach that draws upon thirty years of research and archaeological fieldwork, Jarvis recounts Bermuda's turbulent, dynamic past from the Sea Venture's dramatic 1609 shipwreck through the 1684 dissolution of the Bermuda Company. He argues that the island was the first of England's colonies to produce a successful staple, form a stable community, turn a profit, transplant civic institutions, and harness bound African knowledge and labor. Bermuda was a tabula rasa that fired the imaginations of English thinkers aspiring to create an American utopia. It was also England's first puritan colony, founded as a covenanted Christian commonwealth in 1612 by self-consciously religious settlers who committed themselves to building a moral society. By the 1670s, Bermuda had become England's most densely populated possession and was poised to become an intercolonial maritime hub after freeing itself from its antiquated parent company. The first scholarly monograph in eighty years on this important, neglected colony's first century, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is a worthy prequel to In the Eye of All Trade, Jarvis's masterful first book. Revealing the dynamic interplay of race, gender, slavery, and environment at the dawn of English America, Jarvis's work challenges us to rethink how Europeans and Africans became distinctly American within the crucible of colonization.
Like many other denominations, seventeenth-century Quakers were keen to ensure that members married within their own religious community. In order to properly understand the ramification of such a policy, this book explores the early Quaker marriage approbation process and discipline as demonstrated through the works and marriage of the movement’s leaders, George Fox and Margaret Fell. The book begins with an introduction that briefly summarises the historical context of the early Quaker movement, the ministry of Fox and Fell, and importance they laid upon the marriage approbation discipline. The remainder of the book is divided into three broad chapters. Chapter one examines the practical aspects of the early Quaker marriage approbation discipline, including a summary of seventeenth-century courtship and marriage practice, and an analysis of early Quaker Meeting Minutes. Chapter two then looks at the theological foundations of the marriage approbation process, and the Quaker emphasis on ’Good Order’ and their desire to return to the primitive Christianity of the apostolic church. Chapter three examines the marriage between Fox and Fell, which they presented as a testimony of the union of Christ and his Church. Their married life is analysed through their correspondence to discover whether or not the marriage did indeed exemplify the spiritual gravity originally bestowed upon it by Fox, Fell and some in the Quaker community. Through this close investigation of Quaker marriage approbation, the book offers fascinating insights into early modern English society, attitudes to gender and the early Quakers’ self-perception of themselves as the one and only True Church.