My gut instinct tells me that enough Quakers put in positions of power in the existing hierarchies of the Atlantic economy might just reproduce most if not all of the old oppressions. The Quakers were adaptable in that way so as to accommodate the power structures they depended on to ensure their sect’s survival. Realistically I can’t as easily see those folks, when shorn of the radicalism of their forebearers at century’s end, make a successful effort to fully resist the temptations settler colonialism places in their path. The case I would like to point to to illustrate this point is the case of the wealthy Quaker merchants of Philadelphia, who engaged in the Atlantic slave trade around this time before a consensus was built amongst the community to oppose such practices. Eventually the tide turned against such practices in the community but, I’m skeptical it would always break that way in every case. Material incentives can be quite powerful in that way.

Then again, what about the outliers makes them that way, I wonder? Sometimes it doesn’t break on material incentives and you have to ask yourself: Why does that happen? How do we get people like Benjamin Lay and John Brown?

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