Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

7
Meeting Friends and Doing Business:
Quaker Missionary and Commercial Activities in
Europe, 1655–1720
SÜNNE JUTERCZENKA
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) originated mainly from
‘the middling sort of people’. 1 Historians have observed that it subsequently
moved up the social scale, in William C. Braithwaite’s
words, ‘from lower-middle-class obscurity into upper-middle-class
respectability’, 2 at the same time as it developed from a loose movement
of persecuted Nonconformists into a highly organized and reputable
Society. Recent studies of the social history of the Society have
focused on individual regions; they have highlighted a degree of geographical
variation in both occupation and social status during the
first few decades, 3 and have thus offered a more differentiated picture.
Through the first two and a half centuries however, the overall
pattern remains one of upward social mobility and simultaneous
internal consolidation. 4 When the famous confectionery manufactur-
1 Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985), 20. Also
see James Walvin, The Quakers: Money and Morals (London, 1997), 30.
2 Quoted in Arthur Raistrick, Quakers in Science and Industry: Being an Account
of the Quaker Contributions to Science and Industry During the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries (2nd edn. Newton Abbot, 1968), 49.
3 See David Scott, Quakerism in York, 1650–1720 (York, 1991) and Nicholas
Morgan, Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment, 1660–1730 (Halifax, 1993).
4 Cf., however, Vann, who arrives at the conclusion that ‘in the beginnings of
Quakerism the gentry and wholesale traders were especially drawn to it, and
that the tendency was for the social standing of Friends to decline during the
first century’. Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism
1655–1755 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 50. There has also been some disagreement
regarding occupational patterns. While Raistrick claims that Quakers
gradually ‘moved from predominantly craftsman–artisan in the seventeenth
century, to middle-class traders in the late eighteenth century’ (Raistrick,
187