Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution by Sarah Crabtree, and: London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community by Jordan Landes (review)

The study of Quakers in a transatlantic context is not new. Frederick Tolles was writing in the field in the 1950s. Nonetheless, Atlantic history, and Quaker history within that field, has changed markedly since Tolles asserted the significance of a Quaker Atlantic community. Recent books by Jordan Landes and Sarah Crabtree are welcome additions to this growing field.

Landes offers an important examination of the first fifty years of the Quaker Atlantic and the role that London Friends played in its creation and maintenance. While focused on London Quakers, her work is truly Atlantic in scope. Landes demonstrates that London Quakers were ideally situated to be at the religious, ideological, and political center of Atlantic Quakerism. As Quakers settled throughout the British Atlantic world, London Quakers developed a framework for maintaining contact with distant Friends. Landes identifies the creation of the London Yearly Meeting and its administrative meetings (the Second Day Morning Meeting and the Meeting for Sufferings) as essential to changing the nature of London Quakers’ relationship with Quakers throughout the Atlantic. London was already a hub of national and international importance in the Atlantic world with connections in trade, printing, and politics when Quakerism emerged in the 1650s. With their access to Parliament, the Privy Council, printers, and trade networks, Landes argues that London Quakers were in a position to create and adapt networks and participate in the movement of ideas, goods, and people throughout the Atlantic. They intentionally used regular correspondence, print materials, and a travelling ministry together with personal, political, and trade networks to produce a system that firmly established Quakerism throughout the Atlantic world. Importantly, although London’s influence on the Atlantic world is central to her study, Landes also explores the ways that transatlantic encounters, experiences, and networks changed Quakerism.

London Quakers is based on impressive transatlantic archival and primary source research. Landes assesses London Yearly Meeting’s (LYM) ability to control the religious message and to protect the Gospel Order, the faith, and the unity of the transatlantic Quaker communities. She concludes that internal and external challenges exposed the difficulties of distance in administering discipline. At the same time, Landes demonstrates that these challenges reveal the industry of LYM in controlling and responding to schismatic messages and threatening legislation, as well as its vigor in working to protect the faith through its established and adapted networks. An entire chapter examines the transatlantic Quaker book trade and LYM’s “near monopoly of the Quaker press before 1725” (124), another mechanism in buttressing Quaker networks and beliefs. Shared language in transatlantic epistolary correspondence indicates the existence of “a cultural exchange” between the metropole and its constituent meetings (50). And careful examination of commercial activity indicates that transatlantic commerce benefitted some London Quakers, strengthening their position within the Meeting; at the same time, it reinforced expanding religious networks. Landes contends that, before 1725, Friends throughout the Quaker Atlantic looked to London as a “direction and source of information, spiritual guidance, ideas, and trade” (163). Her well-researched and carefully argued work sets the stage for further studies that might explore other “nodes” in the expansive network the Quaker Atlantic. Were Bristol, Dublin, and Philadelphia parallel or competing hubs to London? Moreover, if London was the center of institutional unity in the early years of the Society, when and how did that shift? How did local expressions of the faith shape Quakerism?

Crabtree’s work, as its subtitle suggests, explores the transatlantic Quaker ministry in the revolutionary era. Evaluating the works of Public Friends, she argues that, in the contentious period of the late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth...