John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire

by Geoffrey Plank

Overview

The abolitionist John Woolman (1720-72) has been described as a "Quaker saint," an isolated mystic, singular even among a singular people. But as historian Geoffrey Plank recounts, this tailor, hog producer, shopkeeper, schoolteacher, and prominent Quaker minister was very much enmeshed in his local community in colonial New Jersey and was alert as well to events throughout the British Empire. Responding to the situation as he saw it, Woolman developed a comprehensive critique of his fellow Quakers and of the imperial economy, became one of the most emphatic opponents of slaveholding, and helped develop a new form of protest by striving never to spend money in ways that might encourage slavery or other forms of iniquity.

Drawing on the diaries of contemporaries, personal correspondence, the minutes of Quaker meetings, business and probate records, pamphlets, and other sources, John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom shows that Woolman and his neighbors were far more engaged with the problems of inequality, trade, and warfare than anyone would know just from reading the Quaker's own writings. Although he is famous as an abolitionist, the end of slavery was only part of Woolman's project. Refusing to believe that the pursuit of self-interest could safely guide economic life, Woolman aimed for a miraculous global transformation: a universal disavowal of greed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812244052
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	03/28/2012
Series:	Early American Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Geoffrey Plank is Professor in the School of American Studies, University of East Anglia. He is author of An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia and Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire, both also available from University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Past Ages: History
2. Deserts and Lonely Places: Social Diversion and Solitary Meditation
3. More Than Was Required: Quaker Meetings
4. The Road to Large Business: Family and Work
5. A Dark Gloominess Hanging over the Land: Slavery
6. Men in Military Posture: The Seven Years' War
7. Not in Words Only: Conspicuous Instructive Behavior
8. The Deep: Crossing the Sea
9. A Messenger Sent from the Almighty: England and Death
Epilogue

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"This splendid study is perhaps the best attempt to date to explain Woolman. . . .Highly Recommended."

Choice

"Plank's approach allows us to understand the extent to which John Woolman was both a man of his time and a discerning prophet."

The Journal of American History

"A carefully researched and quietly brilliant work that provides a genuinely new perspective on a familiar figure in the history of antislavery. Plank finds in Woolman not only an early opponent of slavery but also an ardent critic of most every facet of commercial life in the Delaware Valley and, more generally, the British Empire."

Columbia University Christopher Brown

"Plank's approach allows us to understand the extent to which John Woolman was both a man of his time and a discerning prophet."—The Journal of American History

"This splendid study is perhaps the best attempt to date to explain Woolman. . . .Highly Recommended."—Choice

"A carefully researched and quietly brilliant work that provides a genuinely new perspective on a familiar figure in the history of antislavery. Plank finds in Woolman not only an early opponent of slavery but also an ardent critic of most every facet of commercial life in the Delaware Valley and, more generally, the British Empire."—Christopher Brown, Columbia University

From the Publisher