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.
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