The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class
2010; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0047-2263
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoLarry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging Culture of Planter Class, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2009, xii + 192 pp.The social and economic challenges hegemony of planters are themes that appear often in histories. In a book published recently, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery, Verene Shepherd assesses importance of livestock pens in colonial Jamaica, using relationship between pen keepers and planters, and showing that, for most part, this relationship was one of contestation.1 Larry Gragg's work on Quakers in Barbados is part of this growing literature on same issue of contestation, but within a framework much different from Shepherd's study. His focus is on religious intolerance on one hand and conscientious objection on other.Gragg attempts position Quakerism broadly in context of Atlantic World. By doing so, he offers some insights into remarkable connections that existed between Europe and America and Africa and Caribbean (p. 2). According him, a great deal of hardship characterized careers of evangelical Protestants who had settled all over Americas, and Quakers were among many that suffered. In Slavery and Protestant Missions in Imperial Brazil, historian Jose Carlos Barbosa has shown that missionaries who went work in colonial Brazil were persecuted, and Gragg has adequately shown that Quakers faced similar persecution in Barbados.2 In response this situation, Quakers acted with a mixture of compliance and defiance, same responses adopted by other missionaries on island and elsewhere in colonial Caribbean.Despite opposition slavery, Quakers, like other missionaries, were deeply involved in institution. In 1680, they kept some 3,254 persons in bondage in Barbados and freed only twenty of them between 1674 and 1720 (p. 125). The majority of Quakers helped perpetuate slavery by bequeathing their slaves heirs (p. 140). Ironically, however, Gragg finds Quaker manumissions noteworthy, in spite of small number of persons whom they freed. Gragg based his view on fact that even this small number of manumissions was 4 per cent higher than for average on island as a whole. Still, what seems much more significant is that smaller number of Quaker manumissions underlines depth of involvement in slavery at that time. In fact, George Fox, founder of Quakers (or Society of Friends) in 1652, and focus of chapter 1 of this work, did pursue actively abolition of slavery as an institution (pp. 14, 17). However, despite his taking up challenge to explain any who would listen about errors of many 'vain traditions' , Fox had simply aligned himself with many other leaders of Protestant missionaries who tolerated slaveholding in Caribbean, hoping use moral improvement miraculously turn slaveholders into emancipators.Barbados was a difficult place for Quakers establish movement initially, but they did in fact build communities which were relatively strong and stable. Gragg argues that Society of Friends attracted persons of all classes. It was denomination of choice for a diverse group of Barbadians. Both marginalized and mainline persons joined church. According Gragg, the material circumstances of Quakers . . . reveal no significant connection between financial standing and likelihood of being convinced (p. 74). Persons of all classes were encouraged become members of Society and this position places in clearer context decision of leadership not challenge what was viewed as an important economic institution. Undoubtedly, Quakers were opposed inequality in church and society, and encouragement of a diverse membership was an appeal moral conscience change values and norms of population. …
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