Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Quaker Missionary and Commercial Activities
it might be of service to Truth to have that Book Printed in French’. 57
The meeting agreed and in due course, Barclay’s book was translated.
French copies were taken to all major trading ports along the
English coast, some explicitly to be handed to shipmasters who
would take them abroad. 58 Similarly, when Willem Sewel’s sympathetic
history of Quakerism was published in Dutch in 1717 and
translated into English in 1722, the London Meeting for Sufferings,
which oversaw the production and distribution of translations into
English, instructed its members to find out ‘what Trading Cityes
Near or Remote friends do know of to place a few for sale’. 59
Occasionally, business relationships also proved helpful to missionaries
in trouble with the authorities. When Thomas Rudd was
imprisoned in France ‘for giving away abo.[u]t 5 books’, 60 and ‘for
going into their place of worship [a church] with his hat on’ in 1680, 61
the Meeting for Sufferings contacted a local English merchant. John
Phillips was willing to report on the state of affairs, advance Rudd
some money, and pass his correspondence on to a member of the
Meeting. After his release, Rudd reported to the Meeting that Phillips
had ‘been kind to him’, 62 although he was not a Quaker himself.
Continental Quaker Business Life
Regarding the business activities of Continental Quaker converts,
Dutch and German sources contain little compared with the records
left by early modern Quakers in Britain. While British registers of
birth, marriage, and death and other records have yielded ample data
57 See minutes of the Morning Meeting, 14 Nov. 1698, LSF, MM 2, 126.
58 See LSF, MS 16, 9 May 1703, 235.
59 See the minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 19 June 1720, LSF, MS 23, 69.
In the eighteenth century, the Society re-wrote its history in line with the pacifist
principles it had by then adopted, contradicting its public image as riotous
and enthusiastic. Sewel’s Histori was subjected to such modifications. See Erin
Bell, ‘Eighteenth-Century Quakerism and the Rehabilitation of James Nayler,
Seventeenth-Century Radical’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 59 (2008), 420–
46, esp. 441–6.
60 LSF, MS 4, 31 May 1685, 94.
61 Ibid. 4 June 1685, 130.
62 Ibid. 18 July 1685, 137.
203