Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

Quaker Missionary and Commercial Activities
ing of a young lass who is learning a trade—the youngest daughter
of Philip de Veer of Friedrickstad’. 90
Similarly, the Dutch Quakers in several instances assisted co-religionists
who had run into financial trouble or lost their jobs in order
to help them save their businesses or at least make a living for themselves.
Thus when Brught Takes of De Woude in Friesland became
unemployed, he was commissioned to make beehives for the
Harlingen Quakers, who promised to buy them even ‘at a loss’. 91 Jan
Jansen, another member of the Harlingen Monthly Meeting was sent
wooden wares that he would be able to sell at a profit; he was carefully
instructed to pay the money back as soon as possible. 92 Jansen
either received financial support from the Monthly Meeting or acted
in a similar function to Eelke Aukes, who had undertaken to market
the beehives for Takes on behalf of the Meeting. 93
But support was not unconditional. Just as in England, members
who did not fulfil expectations of sound business practice were subject
to disciplinary measures. The Rotterdam banker Henry Hope
was found by the General Meeting at Amsterdam to have rashly
speculated with borrowed money in 1676. The Meeting duly published
a lengthy ‘testimony’, in which it distanced itself from his ‘burdening
himself with debts, and encumbering himself with the means
of other people without having sufficient opportunity of giving satisfaction
to them; giving his word, and not living up to it’. 94 Although
Henry was publicly disowned, the Hope family continued to be associated
with the Dutch Quakers. Henry’s son Archibald helped to
achieve the legalizing of Quaker marriages, and family members
later acted as trustees when the Rotterdam meeting house was sold.
They also sometimes acted as interpreters for Quaker missionaries. 95
In 1677 Joannes Clasen of Deinum in Friesland was accused of hav-
90 Quoted in SCL, Hull MSS, box 19, folder 2B, 371.
91 See LSF, Temp MSS 749/2, minutes of the Monthly Meeting, 6 Aug. 1678,
5v., see minutes for 6 Dec. 1682, 15r.–v.
92 Ibid. 10 June 1679, 7r.
93 See ibid. minutes for 8 Nov. 1677, 4v. and 7 Jan. 1679, 6v. (Takes is reported
to have delivered thirty-two beehives), 11 Mar. 1679, 6v. (he has made
another forty-eight), 8 July 1679, 7r. (all the beehives have been sold, and if
Takes is still without employment, he is asked to make more).
94 Translated in Hull, Benjamin Furly, 245–7.
95 See ibid. 251–2. Continuity with later periods is especially clear in the case
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