Considering the Quaker Way of Business

Earlier this month Robynne Rogers Healey’s review of Esther Sahle’s Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c. 1660-1800 appeared on H-Net.

Nineteenth-century American culture viewed Quaker merchants as unusually successful and moral. Sahle’s book, Healey writes, “challenges the narrative of Quaker exceptionalism—the idea that Quakers’ success in business was a result of unique Quaker structures and business practices, or ‘because, so the story goes, they were Quakers.’”

In fact, the formal ethos of Quaker business networks wasn’t unusual. “Placing Quaker and non-Quaker prescriptive business literature side by side, Sahle reveals their similarity if not their sameness: both shared concerns about debts, taxes, and fraud, all of which were believed to be born out of covetousness; both called upon identical verses of scripture to support their admonitions; and both employed the same metaphors to communicate their message.”

But perhaps Quakers enforced those rules more strictly than other merchants? In the latter half of the period Sahle studied, the Society of Friends underwent a number of significant changes that historians have dubbed the “Quaker Reformation.” Among those changes was a “dramatic increase in disownments after 1750” in both London and Philadelphia.

But I have trouble sorting out the chronology of cause and effect as described in the review:

While Sahle accepts that the transformation of eighteenth-century Quakerism began as a religious reformation in the 1740s, she asserts that dramatic change accelerated in mid-century in response to a series of political conflicts in Pennsylvania that harmed the Society’s public reputation. Disputes between Thomas Penn, the proprietor, and the Quaker-led Assembly during the Seven Years’ War resulted in Quakers becoming the scapegoat for General [Edward] Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne in 1755. Public faith in Quakers deteriorated over the course of the war and during Pontiac’s War that immediately followed [1763–1766], especially after Quakers joined the militia mustered to protect Philadelphia from the Paxton Boys [early 1764].

The Paxton pamphlet war dealt a decisive blow to the Society of Friends’ reputation. The pamphlets crafted an image of Quakers as self-interested, duplicitous pacifists motivated solely by money and power; they refused defense funding for their non-Quaker fellow colonists but resorted to violence if they themselves were threatened. This was not the Friends’ first pamphlet war, but it was one they did not win.

With Quakers threatened by accusations of dishonesty and avarice, Sahle argues, leaders tightened their internal discipline, “especially against infractions that brought dishonor on the Society—financial dishonesty, fighting, and slaveholding.”

I’m unconvinced that events of the 1760s brought about a change that scholars trace to 1750 or earlier. Furthermore, the review notes that most disownments weren’t prompted by violations of business ethics, such as defaulting on debt. Instead, “Violations of the marriage discipline accounted for almost half of the disownments between 1750 and 1800.” Disowning people for marrying outside the sect (as happened with, for example, Betsy Ross) would certainly promote more coherent unity among those left. But it doesn’t seem like it would solve a local public-relations problem.