The slave trade was immediately raised as a matter for debate in the First Federal Congress. In February and March 1790, Quaker petitions on the subject were presented to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a body mainly composed of Quakers, took the lead in presenting these memorials and some of their members, notably James Pemberton and Warner Mifflin, were especially active in providing support. South Carolina’s delegates in Congress tried hard to divert attention away from the moral claims of the memorialists. The issue proved to be too divisive for extensive consideration by Congress at a time when politicians were putting all their efforts into the sustained operation of a national government. For most of the 1790s the American Convention of Abolition Societies met annually to coordinate anti-slave trade activity and to pressurise Congress to act in relation to those aspects of the slave trade where it could legitimately intervene. It never translated its good intentions into a wide-ranging anti-slave trade campaign, but it did pressurise Congress to introduce laws in 1794 and 1800 to restrict the participation of American citizens in the foreign slave trade. The elephant in the room of slave trade restriction in the 1790s was South Carolina, which kept its ports closed to African importations throughout the decade and up to 1803. A sectional divide had emerged in South Carolina between upland planters who needed to recruit additional Africans to grow cotton and indigo and tidewater planters who had sufficient black workers cultivating rice. Many smuggled slaves were brought into South Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century and it only needed a change in the state’s prospective economic circumstance to put pressure on a change to laws relating to the slave trade.

Colonial restrictions on the slave trade main took the form of slave import duties. Nine of the thirteen British North American colonies legislated in favour of such duties at one time or another before the War of Independence. Colonies passed such legislation to restrict slave imports when saltwater Africans were not required economically, when there were fears of slave revolts, in order to boost white immigration, manufacturing and trade and when military costs had to be met. South Carolina made particular use of high slave import duties to stop Africans being imported in the wake of the Stono rebellion of 1739, thereby supporting public safety against protesting slaves. The British parliament reserved the overall political and constitutional right to decide on the merits of slave trade restriction and its decisions were binding. The colonies did not combine to form an anti-slave trade stance before the meetings of the First Continental Congress in 1774, and even then the Guinea traffic formed just one element in the North American boycott of British goods in the tense couple of years leading up to the War of American Independence. Moral concerns about the slave trade were fairly muted in North America’s colonies before the War of Independence. The Quakers were at the forefront of anti-slave trade commentary but even they took decades to persuade their own membership to relinquish slave importation and slaveholding. New England clergymen joined by the 1770s in their condemnation of the slave trade. But there was no consensus in the North American colonies that consistent pressure should be exerted to proscribe the transatlantic slave trade. The trade was banned by most colonies in the non-importation protests of 1776–8, 1769–70 and 1774–6, but there were no detailed discussions about the subject at the two Continental Congresses after the Coercive Acts had been implemented in 1774.

Melanie C. Ross presents the various shapes of Christian liturgies that emerged in non-mainstream Protestant churches, including Quakerism, Anabaptism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and Evangelicalism. Despite the prejudice that these traditions are non-liturgical, she demonstrates the profound theological and spiritual depth of their worship services.

The antislavery campaign was in many ways the cradle of the constellation of reform movements and ideologies that are usefully understood as part of a nineteenth-century global reform culture. Chapter 1 surveys the cultural legacy of antislavery among reformers, as it offers a typology of the main motifs and dominant memories. To set the stage for the following chapters, it discusses how abolitionism served both as an organized and as a cultural movement in the US, the UK, France, the Low Countries, and the German states. It argues that though organizational efforts were insignificant compared to the unprecedented scale of popular mobilisation achieved in the Atlantic World, the cultural impact in Continental Europe – divided into a pre- and post-Uncle Tom’s Cabin phase – was lasting and diverse. This impact was twofold: it lay both in the depictions of the institution of slavery that the movement promoted (in a coordinated fashion) and in the way abolitionism itself came to serve as a venerated model.

Chapter 5 discusses the custom of hat honour, a crucial marker of status in the early modern period, in which men took off their hats as a gesture of civility to social equals or deference to social superiors. The importance of hat honour is underlined by the Quaker challenge to it in the 1650s and 1660s. This was a refusal to observe the norms of civility, but also part of a radically unorthodox bodily habitus which provoked intense disquiet among the Quakers’ opponents as well as division among the Quakers themselves. The central focus of the chapter, however, is on hat honour in church. In the sixteenth century it was the custom for men to wear their hats in church, only removing them at certain points in the service in accordance with the biblical injunction to uncover their heads when ‘praying or prophesying’. But the 1604 Canons ordered that ‘no man shall cover his head in the church or chapel in the time of divine service’, effectively treating the church as a place apart where the normal rules of hat honour did not apply. This exposed an underlying disagreement over the nature of sacred space.

This considers the role of Thomas Clarkson as peace campaigner. Clarkson played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s. Much of his thinking about peace was influenced by the prospects of colonial development. His Portrait of Quakerism (1806), a pioneering explanation of pacific Quaker principles, was followed by his Memoirs of William Penn (1813), the pacifist founder of Pennsylvania, which recommends setting up seminaries to teach the children of the rich, and offers Penn as a model of peaceful colonial relations. As a member of the Africa Institution and the Sierra Leone Company, Clarkson was personally involved in plans for peaceful colonizing. This interest is reflected in The Herald of Peace, the journal of the Peace Society Clarkson helped to establish, in which the example of Penn is often cited. The peace campaign was rooted in the goal of spreading Christianity and European influence globally.

Religious liberty is a core component of America’s legal culture. William Penn, the Quaker founder and proprietor of colonial Pennsylvania, played an indispensable role in ensuring that it is. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson—the author of one of the most celebrated religious liberty laws in American history, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786—described Penn as “the greatest lawgiver the world has produced, the first in either antient or modern times who has laid the foundation of govmt in the pure and unadulterated principles of peace of reason and right.” Jefferson was correct. After all, the commitment to liberty of conscience that characterized colonial Pennsylvania traced directly to Penn’s vision, example, and determination: Pennsylvania enacted more laws about religious tolerance than any other British American colony, both before and after Penn’s death. Delaware, which Penn also owned and which constituted the “lower counties” of Pennsylvania until it became an independent state in 1776, likewise enacted religiously tolerant laws even when Penn permitted it to govern itself with a separate assembly after 1704.

The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

As the internment unfolded, numerous prominent Americans actively tried to combat it. Religious and civic groups, from the Quakers to the Fair Play Committee, independently strove to aid those within the camps. Returning from house arrest in Tokyo, the American Ambassador to Japan toured the United States in an effort to soften hatred toward the Japanese. A high-placed intelligence official and expert on Japanese Americans anonymously published an article with a similar objective. Two Japanese Americans, Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu, resisted the evacuation through the courts. All of these efforts, however, were uncoordinated, and the President’s order remained in place. This chapter traces the disparate measures that Americans pursued to undo a grave injustice.

As the century progressed, there was an increasing emphasis on more moderate forms of discourse and behaviour that rejected the divisive social and religious attitudes of the previous century. Supporters of the primacy of the Established Church now needed other weapons, beyond legal recourse and vituperative argument, to challenge the position of Dissent. As all parties tried to work out their shifting roles in the wake of legislative change, religious prejudice began to find its expression in new forms. Chapter 3 argues that politeness, in particular, became a mode of behaviour through which tacit religious exclusion could be reframed in new, more socially acceptable, ways. Focusing particularly on how the idea of politeness interacted with the accusation of Dissenting hypocrisy, it highlights how this discourse did not wholeheartedly reject the religious divisions of the previous century, but rather re-configured them for a new era of supposed moderation.

British voluntary and faith organizations were important components of the rapidly expanding “third sector” of civil society and non-governmental organizations in the post-1945 international system. Many postwar international volunteers had participated in relief efforts for displaced persons during the war. This included the Friends (Quakers) Ambulance Unit (FAU), which operated the Friends Post War Service (FPWS, 1946–48) and the Friends Ambulance Unit International Service (FAUIS, 1948–59). These organizations provided Quaker conscientious objectors with an alternate means of completing their National Service. This chapter evaluates the historical experiences of FPWS/FAUIS volunteers as examples of international service motivated by moral conviction and argues that FPWS/FAUIS relief work constituted a form of private international social governance.

Not simply the persistence of Greek and Roman comedy and tragedy, drama of the modern era had its rebirth in the liturgical performances within the church. Once the miracle and morality plays were moved out of the church, literally pro-fane, their secularized forms were soon suspected of degeneration, and the antitheatrical prejudice was promulgated. To control the possibly disruptive effects of the drama, censorship was introduced to spare leaders of Church or state from being maligned on stage. The Church of England may have been protected but Gothic melodrama found its villains and victims among the monks and nuns. Methodists, Quakers, Jews, dissenters, and nonconformists were targets for theatrical ridicule or abuse. Circumventing the proscriptions of the Licensing Act (1737), Shakespeare’s history plays provided a model for representing religious conflict on stage.

Nineteenth-century England had a large population of Christians who did not belong to the Church of England, and a proportion of Jews, though as yet almost no Muslims. The civic position of Jews had partly improved by this time. There was growing interest in the problems presented by what would now be thought of as ‘ecumenical relations’, with the first Lambeth Conferences giving the matter consideration, though excluding the Roman Catholics. This chapter explores the relationships between the main categories of non-Anglican Protestant Christians, including the ways in which they might be regarded as being part of the Church, that is, having an authentic ecclesial identity. The refusal of the Friends (Quakers) to take oaths was accommodated and the rights of Roman Catholics were thought through, with particular reference to Ireland. Dissenting academies were providing an excellent higher education.Problems were arising about the payment of clerical income and the costs of maintaining churches because non-Anglicans resented having to make a contribution.

Quakers, originally from The Netherlands and Germany, were the first to formulate criticism of slavery in the Caribbean and North America in the Germant0own Declaration of 1688. Only in the late 18th century Quakers also had political influence in the UK, e.g. through the discourse of Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, describing the horrors of the Middle Passage. At the same time in France, some Enlightenment philosophers also critical of slavery, though often ambiguously. Most explicit was the discourse of Condorcet.

This chapter seeks to reconnect American puritan literary histories with the Caribbean, to show that we cannot fully understand seventeenth-century American literature without taking into account the fact that the Caribbean was a place in which and through which American puritan literature was written. The chapter traces the entanglement of the Caribbean with New England through the circulation and exchange of goods, bodies, citizens, texts, and ideas. The chapter considers, in particular, two historical examples of New England puritan engagement with the Caribbean – the slave trade and Quaker dissent – and two examples of literary engagement – A Continuation of the State of New England (a pamphlet describing King Philip’s War in New England and a thwarted slave rebellion in Barbados) and records from the Salem witch trials. This chapter argues that the both the material reality and the idea of the Caribbean shaped the American puritan imaginary. On the one hand, the islands were key trading partners, and the continued existence of a puritan “New England Way” depended on this trade as a source of steady income. On the other, New Englanders sought to distance themselves from the islands and represent themselves as singularly “godly” English settlers.

Pennsylvania was one of the latest American regions to pursue sericulture, and offers the best illustration of how silken ambitions survived and were reshaped to fit new political and economic environments in the Revolutionary era. Pennsylvanian silk swung from being a dutiful imperial pursuit, albeit one with particular local characteristics, to being an objective very much in step with American independence. It constituted a unique kind of homespun that came to embody not only domestic elegance but also provided ammunition for broader debates over political economy and the future identity of American industrial development. Philadelphia, situated in the heart of the North American colonies, was the first home of the Continental Congress, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the site of the federal capital for ten years between 1790 and 1800. Before all that, it was also the location of the mid-Atlantic’s first silk filature. The production owed much to the creation of a Silk Society by progressive gentlemen, but much of the labour was performed by women in households and communities in the city’s hinterlands.

Great Famine came to see at first-hand the miseries of the people, and to offer analysis of ways forward, not all of which was either unhelpful or discourteous. The chapter also offers a brief study of the late-nineteenth-century writers who appeared unable to free themselves from feelings of insecurity and strife, and of how political uncertainty impinged so completely upon their texts. Drawing tourism developments and literary texts together, this chapter demonstrates the importance of the travel narrative form, its contribution to our political understanding of a particular period and its relevance to literary history more generally.

Chapter Three studies the impact of the Age of Revolution on the formation of communities of free people of color. Across the Americas, the chaos of war, ideologies of equality and liberty, and the specter of slave rebellion in Haiti, inspired legal forms of claims-making and created new opportunities for emancipation. The period from 1763 through the 1820s could be said to be the era of greatest commonality across these jurisdictions. During this period, both Louisiana and Virginia developed significant communities of free people of color, especially in urban areas. Yet freedom was often the unintended consequence of retrenchment and reform rather than revolution. The growth of these communities had radically different political connotations. In Virginia, manumissions became linked to wider debates about slave emancipation and were opposed as a dangerous step toward black citizenship. In Cuba–and by extension in Louisiana under Spanish control–manumission was linked to the regulation of customary practices that had nothing to do with abolition or with republican notions of equality but instead concerned traditional understandings of vassalage, status, and royal justice.