Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy by Julie L. Holcomb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy by Julie L. Holcomb Emma Lapsansky Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. By Julie L. Holcomb. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. xiii + 252 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. Read Holcomb’s footnotes first! “Why the footnotes first?” one might ask. Because reading those citations is the way to appreciate the intricacy of the beautifully-crafted fabric Julie Holcomb has woven. Holcomb has intertwined scholarly threads across oceans, across centuries, across race, gender, and disciplines, and across time, to add to the increasingly-complex tapestry of the narrative of early-modern Atlantic-world philosophical and economic relationships. In weaving this narrative, Holcomb argues—solidly and convincingly—that the “free-produce” movement, which aimed to undermine slavery by boycotting products made with un-free labor, “was the first consumer movement to transcend the boundaries of nation, gender, and race, in an effort by reformers to change the conditions of production.” (p.3) The subtleties of this reformers’ effort have heretofore been largely dismissed as unimportant, probably because the economic impact was negligible. But Holcomb has read deeply into several of the 19th-century reformers’ publications (including The Genius of Universal Emancipation, The Liberator, and the Colored American) to explore the process by which free-produce thought emerged, as well as the implications of that thought, and the controversies surrounding it. And Holcomb did not stop there. She has scrutinized and analyzed the raw material of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-slavery reform, to shed new light on new aspects of the stories of “cheap cotton” and “juvenile abolitionists.” And she has blended her argument into the discourse begun by dozens of previous scholars who have set their pens to similar concerns about slavery and production. Setting her argument firmly on the shoulders of those previous scholars, Holcomb, in eight tidy chapters (including 6 evocative period illustrations) efficiently distills many years of her own research into a sweeping transcontinental analysis that draws on (among other documents)—personal correspondence and perspectives of men and women reformers, and abolitionist publications of white and black Americans; as well as British anti-slavery documents, social- and economic-historians’ narratives, nineteenth-century children’s literature, and documentation of choices and strategies by African Americans rather than just for African Americans. By describing boycott organizations and [End Page 72] strategies across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, and by addressing the tensions and controversies within and between Quaker communities, Holcomb has also helped to blow away some of the clouds around glib generalizations that “the Quakers” were uniformly “anti-slavery.” In the tradition so effectively employed by Brycchan Carey’s From Peace to Freedom, Holcomb examines “process” as well as “product,” thereby spinning a tale that “names names,” and highlights personalities as it interweaves race, gender, politics, theology, and economics into a seamless and riveting narrative. Despite a few proof-reading glitches (e.g., chapter 8, footnote 43), Moral Commerce has cut away some of the underbrush, to expose intriguing pathways for future scholars to explore. For example, Holcomb has largely focused on documents that tell the story of Britain and the eastern United States. We await a deeper investigation of American mid-western networks—such as those described in Thomas Hamm’s God’s Government Begun—which also flirted with “free produce” tactics as part of a larger “Universal Inquiry and Reform,” publishing their perspectives in such publications as Cincinnati’s Philanthropist. And how did anti-slavery networks in other Atlantic-world locations as Canada and Europe fit into the free-produce matrix? Such questions are particularly intriguing with respect to France, where historian Lawrence Jennings tells us that the anti-slavery impulse was shaped by contact with British reformers’ ideas. By providing a multi-textured exploration of the free-produce phenomenon, Holcomb has pointed to some inviting leads for future scholars to follow. Emma Lapsansky Haverford College Copyright © 2017 Friends Historical Association