Quakers & Capitalism: A Brief Recap

It’s been a while since I published an essay in the Quakers and Capitalism series, in which I’ve been digesting a book in progress, a sketchy and rather schematic history of the influence that Friends and capitalism have had on each other. Because of the piecemeal nature of blog posting, I have found myself losing track of my progress and of the arc of the whole; I imagine my readers may have, too. Also, I had fallen behind in creating pdf files of these postings. Thus, before I go on, I’ve decided to offer a brief (well, medium-sized) recap of the project so far.

I have also finished and reorganized the pdf files for each ‘chapter’ in the book. The summary below has links to the respective files and they are also listed as links on the page labeled Quakers & Capitalism—The Book, accessible from the navigation column to the left of the posts. Reading those pdf files in order will give you the main thread of the book. Note that there are several appendices. I’m not satisfied with their style and formatting—I think they’re ugly, in fact, though properly Quaker plain, I suppose—but I did not want to delay while I experiment with style.

I have divided this history of Quakers and capitalism into three main periods: the 1650s, 1700 to 1900, and the 20^th century. These are separated by major periods of transition, periods lasting roughly a generation in which external forces collide with forces within Quakerism to transform both capitalist culture and Quaker culture in a symbiotic relationship. During these periods of transition, Quaker fortunes and their relationship with the world around them completely change. Here’s the sketchy outline, with links to their respective essays:

• Introduction — Introducing John Bellers as perhaps the second most well-known Quaker in history, a man of extraordinary talent and intelligence who had a tremendous impact on Western culture, yet is almost completely unknown among his own Quaker community. Why? Introducing the idea of cultural amnesia regarding economics among Friends, the almost utter lack of meaningful economic testimony (until very recently, at least), notwithstanding our almost indispensable role in creating and developing the capitalist system, and the need for a ministry of teaching and prophetic examination of Quaker economic history.

Quakers & Capitalism — Introduction

• The 1650s — Early Friends (who were mostly yeoman farmers and small trades people) assail the world order with revolutionary fervor in the Lamb’s War, challenging some aspects of economic life, notably in the practices of plain speech and refusing hat honor, but somewhat indirectly, as their focus was essentially religious and aimed primarily at the church. Friends absorb the leaders and members of both the Diggers and the Levellers, more radical egalitarian social movements, but do not absorb their ideas.

Quakers & Capitalism — The 1650s

• First major transition (1661 – 1695) — Externally, the persecutions, and internally, the establishment of gospel order, completely transform Quaker culture and Quaker economics. After the Restoration, the state tries to stamp the movement out and seizes vast amounts of Quaker treasure over roughly thirty years. Friends respond to these external pressures by reorganizing—or perhaps organizing would be a better description—instituting structures and processes for internal discipline. Notwithstanding the intense economic assault, however, Friends emerge from this period as a class of wealthy merchants poised to create not quite single-handedly the first truly new platform for creating wealth since the invention of agriculture: industrial capitalism. This extraordinary feat—not just thriving in the face of economic oppression, but ending up in a position to change the world, after all—was a cultural miracle.

First Transition: Persecution and Gospel Order

• 1700 – 1900: The Double-culture Period
• The 18^th century — During the 18^th century and on into the 19^th century, Quakers make many of the indispensable technological innovations upon which industrial capitalism depends, including coke smelting, cast steel, and the railroad. They build many of the key industries, establish many of the most important companies, build its financial infrastructure, develop new modes of organization, and pioneer humane treatment of workers. At the same time that they are engaging the world of business, industry and commerce with incredible energy and invention, they are withdrawing from engagement with the world in virtually every other area of life. Friends maintain this double culture for two hundred years. In England, they become fabulously wealthy; in America, they do pretty well.
• John Bellers and Quaker responses to Industrial capitalism — Already by 1700, the new industrial economy was creating a new class of the poor: industrial workers, people who had left the land or their village to work in the new urban factories. One extraordinary Friend, John Bellers, saw the problem and proposed a solution: Colledges of Industry. In several pamphlets over 25 years, he brought his ideas to Friends and to Parliament. Both declined to act on them. He made many other significant contributions to Western civilization, as well, only to be virtually forgotten by his own people for two hundred years.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period

Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism

• Minor transition (1800 – 1828) — Two new ideologies, or domains of western thought, are born as fraternal twins around 1800— evangelical theology and the new ‘science’ of political economy. Thomas Malthus, in particular, was both an evangelical minister and one of the first progenitors of political economy; in his work, the two are fused into one approach to wealth and poverty. Evangelical political economy dominates economic policy in competition with classical economics; Malthus, the evangelical minister, and David Ricardo the investor, (and married to a Quaker, though a Jew converted to Unitarianism himself), embody this rivalry in the early 1800s, though they are personal friends. Joseph John Gurney and Thomas Chalmers make the most influential connection between evangelical Friends and evangelical political economy; these hugely influential figures also are friends.
• The 19th century — Quakers fragment under the influence of evangelicalism and some evangelical Friends partially reengage with economic/social issues, notably becoming leaders in the philanthropical movement that is the signature response to capitalism’s collateral damage in the Victorian period.

Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelicalism and Political Economy

• Major transition (1895 – 1920) — A number of external forces combine with new trends in Quakerism to end the double-culture period and usher in the spirit of liberal engagement with the world that characterizes much of Quaker culture in the 20^th century. Quakers had cut a deal with the powers that be: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Now the deal was off.

Second major transition: The Corporation, the Great War, Liberalism and the Social Order

This last transition period is a complex one and deserves a little more treatment. For one thing, the fragmentation of Quaker culture in the 1800s means that the forces unleashed at the turn of the century affect different communities differently. You can’t really tell just one story, as I have been trying to do so far. And these forces are so many and so complex that it’s hard to treat them properly in a format like a blog. But here goes:

• The rise of corporate capitalism — The laws governing the limited liability corporation are finally settled definitively in the 1890s in both America and Britain and the modern corporation is born—a business owned by shareholders rather than private families and so big as to require management. Over time, this innovation deconstructs the great Quaker fortunes in Great Britain.
• The emergence of the social sciences, including the science of economics — New kinds of thinking are brought to bear on social problems. The Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty plays a central role in proving scientifically that the poor are not poor because of poor character but because of structural inequities in capitalism itself. In England, the rise of New Liberalism gives birth to a new political party and inaugurates the welfare state, in which, for the first time, government tries to protect the citizenry from capitalism’s downside.
• Classical economics takes the field — Classical economic theory eclipses evangelical political economy, which was already in decline. However, the spirit of evangelical political economy—the blame for poverty on character (sin), the reliance on private and faith-based solutions for social ills, and the dread of government intervention—lies dormant.
• The rise of liberalism — The Richmond Conference in America in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in England in 1895 mark the beginning of ‘liberal’ Quakerism, in which ‘liberal’ ideas, especially the scientific study of the Bible, transform and galvanize British Friends and the Hicksite branch of American Quakerism. FGC and FUM (then Five Years Meeting) are born. Rufus Jones introduces a new historiography of Quakerism in which the faith is recast as “mystical” and Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone” is understood anew as a kind of neo-Platonic divine spark; it becomes over time the central tenet of liberal Quakerism.
• The Great War — For the first time in two hundred years, Friends are persecuted for their convictions of conscience. This helps to decisively pull Quakers, especially young adult Friends, back into engagement with the world. AFSC is born.
• The rise of ‘social concerns’ — London Yearly Meeting explores the relationship between war and the social order and, in 1918, approves the Foundations of a True Social Order, a decisive departure from the hands-off attitude toward the social order maintained during the double-culture period and a fairly radical indictment of capitalism as one of the factors leading to the Great War. The document and the debate are carried forward into the first Friends World Conference in 1920 in London. Quaker culture enters the modern era.

I’ve not yet written one of these transition essays, on the rise of liberalism. I have a lot of new notes from recent research that I need to digest first. And I’ve only just begun to research the economic history of Friends during the twentieth century. In a subsequent entry, I do want to outline the subjects and the people who I think figure prominently in 20^th century Quakerism, and I invite any readers who know any of these subjects or people in some depth to contribute. It’s going to take me a while, a long while, to finish this project alone. I welcome collaboration.

Quakers & Capitalism—Friends and evangelical political economics

Joseph John Gurney and Thomas Chalmers

England has had three legal systems for taking care of the poor since Queen Elizabeth I reformed the punitive Tudor system, which was breaking down in the face of the decline of monasticism and the wider medieval social structure. Her reforms (1597 and 1601) created a national poor law system for England and Wales that used the parish as the administrative structure and supplied funds through a compulsory land tax levied at the parish level. It put people who couldn’t work into poorhouses, subsidized the labor of the able-bodied poor, put vagrants in a House of Correction, and arranged apprenticeships for pauper children. The British colonists brought this system with them to North America.

The assessment system itself began to break down in the face of industrialization, which drew large numbers of rural poor into the cities to work in the new factories, straining the urban parishes with heavy taxes and overwhelming responsibilities. By the time of the depression of 1825, which I mentioned in the previous post, the assessment system was ramping up to meet the growing demand and spreading on the heals of increased poverty to areas like Scotland, while its shortcomings were becoming more and more unacceptable. Thomas Malthus, the extremely influential evangelical minister and early political economist, had published his landmark work An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and had added five more editions by 1825. David Ricardo, the classical economist, published his hugely influential Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, having been inspired to enter the field after reading Malthus.

The debate about how to care for the poor and reduce or eliminate poverty was on. Pressure was mounting to act and the nation was becoming ready to embrace radical reform. Many looked to greater state intervention because local resources were so inadequate, and many agreed that a national system was required to help smooth out the vagaries of local organization. Evangelical political economists like Malthus resisted this trend, however, believing that aid to the poor only encouraged the very sins that had made them poor in the first place—laziness, vices like gambling and drink, and sex—having more kids than they could support. They also felt that mandatory taxes and a state-sponsored distribution system undermined the moral character and opportunities of the rich. They insisted that the spiritual needs of the giver—that is, themselves—were at least as important as those of the receivers—the poor. Each act of charity, to be a genuine act of conscience, had to be voluntary, spontaneous and discriminating. You had to be involved for benefit to accrue. The real obligation was to God, not to the poor. Institutionalizing charity denied the rich the blessing they might receive and denied the poor the opportunity for the kind of personal contact that could ignite a conversion.

Into this exciting environment came the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, a brilliant, charismatic, innovative and energetic man who’d become a zealous evangelical after a personal conversion experience. Of his character, the Wikipedia entry says this: “He was transparent in character, chivalrous, kindly, firm, eloquent and sagacious; his purity of motive and unselfishness commanded absolute confidence; he had originality and initiative in dealing with new and difficult circumstances, and great aptitude for business details.”

Like Malthus and his other evangelical peers, Chalmers believed that poverty resulted from flawed moral character and that private voluntary charity was the solution. Already famous in Great Britain for his theological writings, he solidified his reputation as a political economist by testing his ideas in the field in what amounted to an early 19^th century faith-based initiative. When the Scotsman took over the very poor parish of St. John in Glasgow in 1819 after four years at another church, the British system of compulsory tax assessment for the poor was gaining ground in Scotland. Chalmers believed that this approach actually made things worse and proposed a voluntary approach involving radically reorganizing the parish and applying a rigorous program of family visitation, counseling and monitoring to enforce moral rectitude. In four years, he reduced annual pauper relief in the parish from ₤1,400 to ₤280. The astounding success of his program greatly impressed the rest of the political and political economic elites, especially when they looked at the numbers rather than the huge organizational effort involved. Chalmers himself burned out from the work load and, in 1823, having ‘made the numbers,’ left his extremely demanding life running this operation and accepted a chair in moral philosophy at St. Andrews. This was the seventh academic offer made to him in his eight years in Glasgow. His lectures and writings influenced political economic thinking and policy for the next 25 years and beyond.

Where do Friends fit in all this? So far, my researches have found little to indicate specifically what Quakers, and especially, evangelical Quakers, thought of evangelical political economy. It seems that Friends shared their moral-economic worldview to a large extent, but not its harshness of tone or cold-heartedness in practice. Wealthy Friends were morally paternalistic themselves and they shared with these evangelical thinkers a commitment to personal and spontaneous giving. And I know that Chalmers became friends with the Gurneys and other Quakers, whom he called “the most serviceable philanthropists we met with.” [The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Boyd Hilton, p. 59. This book is the source for much of my thinking in this area and is a great resource.] Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry accompanied Chalmers when he testified before a Select Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland in 1830, presumably because they shared his views. Evangelical Friends also shared these men’s extreme nervousness about their own spiritual health and the moral dangers of wealth. J.J. Gurney claimed that the most “salutary chastisements” he had received from God had “arisen out of being . . . a ‘monied man,’” [Hilton, p. 116 n.3, quoting Gurney’s journal] and, as I said in the previous post, he reported “feeling the Lord to be near to us” during the severe economic crisis of 1825, expressing the belief that market collapses could be times of visitation.

The clearest evidence that Chalmers and his ideological brethren spoke to the evangelical Quaker condition that I’ve found is a book published in 1853 by Joseph John Gurney titled Chalmeriana, or, Colloquies with Dr. Chalmers (available from Google Books). Gurney speaks very glowingly of Chalmers in this little book, praising his modesty and religious humility, the earnestness of his faith, his stellar character as a man, the effectiveness of his poverty program, and, especially, the intellectual power and moral force of his extraordinary mind. They clearly had a deep regard for each other.

I think it’s fair to say that at least they shared many of the essentials of evangelical faith and its general implications for economic practice. And I don’t think it goes too far to say that Gurney represents in large degree his evangelical Quaker peers in these matters.

One crucial area of difference does peek through, however. Chalmers is preoccupied with judgment and with justice as the primary attribute of God, and he was a self-avowed predeterminist. Gurney gives equal weight to God’s goodness. Chalmers looks at the cross and the Atonement and sees God’s judgment.. Gurney sees a divine gift of love. In one section of the book, the two men are discussing the work of several other writers on the moral attributes of God. Chalmers is warning against reducing God’s character to the single quality of benevolence when justice (that is, judgment) is (to Chalmers) obviously more important. Gurney, though, argues: “Surely, that [the atonement of Christ; emphasis is Gurney’s] is where justice and benevolence meet; where God has displayed at once his abhorrence of sin and his mercy to the sinner.” In the dialog Gurney records, Chalmers veers away from Gurney’s point without responding to it.

To generalize, though acutely conscious of sin and of the sinner’s desperate need for Atonement, evangelical Friends remained more optimistic, more open to God’s goodness. Precisely in the Atonement did they see God’s goodness most clearly demonstrated. This, I think, made evangelical Friends much less willing to leave people in their suffering as the necessary road to contrition and conversion, and made them much more willing to minister to sufferers in their need. The work of Elizabeth Fry, J. J. Gurney’s sister, is instructive here. Once awakened from her life as a rich, unreligious, even frivolous (in her own eyes) ingénue, she ends up in the Newgate prison wards trying to help real people. Her tools are the classic evangelical ones: literacy, moral exhortation and the Bible. But her hands are dirty and her heart is burning with care.

Non-evangelical Friends, on the other hand, in their quietist passivity, had not the motivation of the missionary to get them into the world with the same fervor. Their inwardness tended to keep them out of philanthropy and movements for social reform. At the other extreme, super-evangelicals, especially leaders in America of the pre-millennialist holiness movement that emerged in the 1870s and ‘80s from the evangelical awakening of mid-century, these Friends saw relief work as the devil’s work and abandoned the poor to the wrath of God’s judgment. According to Professor Hamm in The Transformation of American Quakerism, this point of view was quite influential among American evangelical leaders for quite some time, though Friends in the benches tended to be more moderate in their theology and compassionate in their views.

Evangelical political economics dominated discourse and policy in England into the middle of the 19th century. By then, several factors had began to erode its influence over policy, with the horrible Irish famine as a crucial turning point. We will turn to this history in the next post. But the moral philosophy of evangelical political economic thinking has never disappeared and has periodically regained the allegiance of some politicians in America, as we well know. In the hands of Herbert Hoover (a Quaker), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, this moral economic philosophy has played a major role in American public policy.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Evangelical Transition

In this series of posts and in my book on Quakers and Capitalism, I have divided Quaker economic history into three major periods defined by the ways that Friends engaged with the world around them. These major historical periods were separated by major periods of transition, in which external forces and internal forces collided to produce a new Quaker alignment. In the first transition period, brought on by the persecutions in England in the last decades of the 17^th century, the external pressures of persecution and the internal imposition of gospel order closed a period of intense apocalyptic engagement with the world and opened a period of cultural dualism, in which Friends withdrew from the world socially, politically and religiously, but channeled incredible energy outward into the world of business, commerce and finance.

Over the course of the 18^th century, Friends played key roles in creating modern capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and they continued to build the new economy throughout the 19^th century. The turn of the 20^th century brought a second major transition, in which the rise of corporate capitalism, liberal thought and new persecutions during the First World War collided with a liberalizing movement within Quakerism. The result was a decisive turn outward, away from quietist withdrawal and into much more vigorous and creative engagement with the world and its problems, including the social fallout and political responses to capitalism’s darkside.

Right in the middle of the double-culture period, however, around 1800, Friends went through a minor period of transition brought on by the rise into cultural prominence of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism opened a door in the wall that Friends had built around themselves and allowed them to reengage with the world in certain ways without giving up their distinctive and even insular culture. More importantly with respect to a study of Quakers and capitalism, the new evangelicalism emerged and co-evolved with the new ‘science’ of economics, though the term ‘economics’ only came into use a hundred years later. Then it was called ‘political economy,’ and focused on the ways that production and consumption were organized in nation states. The first political economists, including its putative ‘father,’ Adam Smith, held chairs in moral philosophy. The first professor of political economy in England was Thomas Malthus (1805).

Malthus was an evangelical minister. Like other evangelical political economists of the time, Malthus’s moral theology shaped his economic theory and this combination gave rise to a second major school of economic thinking that stood in some opposition to the ‘classical’ school first defined by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (published in 1776). Together, these two schools shaped the issues and discourse that defined early modern economic thinking and this dynamic dialog found embodiment in two extraordinary men: Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus and Ricardo were friends but friendly rivals intellectually, and their publishing duel helped define the field of political economy as it matured.

Ricardo was the second great classical economist, after Adam Smith. He was born Jewish and had emigrated to England with his family from Holland. But then he eloped with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, and his family disowned him. He made a fortune in the stock market and ‘retired’ to write at the age of 43. He converted to Unitarianism.

(One of these days, I plan to research Ricardo more thoroughly, hoping to clarify his relationship with his wife’s family and her meeting and with Quakerism in general. Was she herself disowned for marrying out of meeting? Why did he become a Uniterian instead of a Quaker? What affect, if any, did his new religious identity and his exposure to Quakerism have on his economic thinking? If political economy was, in that time, essentially moral philosophy, and if theology was shaping the work of his primary intellectual correspondent, and he himself had undergone some kind of religious transformation, how could these factors not have helped to inform his own ideas?)

No Friends, evangelical or otherwise, contributed significantly to this new discipline of political economy until the second major transition around 1900, and evangelicalism did not alter substantially the momentum or direction of Quaker wealth-building. But it did help to shape the way that Friends approached poverty and other negative consequences of capitalist expansion during the 19^th century. And Joseph John Gurney, the great evangelical Friend of his time, was a close associate and a deep admirer of one of the preeminent evangelical political economists of the age, Thomas Chalmers (1740-1847).

Evangelical political economy dominated economic policy and politics in Great Britain throughout the first half of the 19th century and its moral philosophical approach to social problems has returned to favor periodically ever since. In subsequent posts, I want to

• talk about Chalmers and explore his relationship with Gurney as a window into how evangelical thought helped to shape social and political responses to the structural violence of capitalism;
• look at how evangelical Quakerism adopted and adapted this moral philosophy;
• examine the rise and fall and periodic resurgence of evangelical political economy and the role of some Friends in that history; and
• look briefly at the different course that these issues took in America, where Friends had always been more diverse, not just theologically, but also in terms of social class, social and political geography, economic development, and relative influence over social policy.