On The­Con­ver­sa­tion, a look at how 18th-century Quak­ers led a boy­cott of sug­ar to protest against slav­ery, from Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty prof Julie L. Hol­comb. This is part of a series exam­in­ing “sugar’s effects on human health and culture.”

In the late 17th and ear­ly 18th cen­turies, only a few Quak­ers protest­ed African slav­ery. Indeed, indi­vid­ual Quak­ers who did protest, like Lay, were often dis­owned for their actions because their activism dis­rupt­ed the uni­ty of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. Begin­ning in the 1750s, Quak­ers’ sup­port for slav­ery and the prod­ucts of slave labor start­ed to erode, as reform­ers like Quak­er John Wool­man urged their co-religionists in the North Amer­i­can Colonies and Eng­land to bring about change. 

None of this will be new to reg­u­lar read­ers of Friends Jour­nal and Lar­ry Ingle reviewed Hol­com­b’s book for us in 2017. But it is inter­est­ing to think about the eco­nom­ic aspects both of ear­ly Friends’ embrace of slav­ery in Bar­ba­dos and Penn­syl­va­nia and also of the abo­li­tion­ists’ boy­cott tac­tics. These days orga­ni­za­tions like the Earth Quak­er Action Team con­tin­ue to com­bine social wit­ness with strate­gic eco­nom­ic pressure.

How 18th-century Quak­ers led a boy­cott of sug­ar to protest against slavery 

Eighteenth-century Quak­ers attempt­ed to align their reli­gious beliefs with what they pur­chased. These Quak­ers led some of the…

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