Quaker Slaver

Jim McNeill of the Bristol Radical History Group gave a splendid lecture tonight at Wooden Shoe Books in Philadelphia.

Who knew that our own William Penn was one of a dynasty of super-rich, slave-trading, Indian-hating, land-stealing , absentee landlording bastards? Well, he was, but Pennsylvania has not been a place for harshly criticizing its eponymous creep.

The group's formation was inspired by the fine but chilling book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001) by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Six members are on a tour of the east coast of the US.

The lecture was entitled "The Life & Family of William Penn: 260 years of bloody colonial history." It describes "how Penn's family accumulated their wealth over five generations; their constant anti-republicanism; their involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the bloody colonial British expansion into Ireland, Jamaica and America."

Mix any set of ideas or religious beliefs with Capitalism, and you'll find a recipe for murder. That's quite any. Quakerism is no exception. Until I arrived in Philadelphia a few decades back, the word Quaker was little more that a brand of oatmeal to me, but here that religion has a huge presence. My encounters with its believers have been almost entirely positive, and darker stories emerge only with an eye that's keen on history.

What a treat to learn about my own city from like-minded people of a city far away!