The Quaker Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern British Peace Movement, 1895–1920

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
World History ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
War Resisters ◽  
Religious Body ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Modern Era

Few in Britain were suprised by Quaker opposition to the Great War; the Society of Friends had traditionally condemned war and violence. Many, however, were startled by the nature and intensity of Quaker resistance, which far exceeded anything they had previously attempted. One possible explanation for the militancy of the Society's anti-war stand certainly would be the prospect of enforced military service, a contingency that had not seriously confronted Friends since the seventeenth century. However, this article will argue that the attitudes and actions of Quaker war-resisters were most significantly influenced by a revitalization of the peace testimony that had remained dormant for nearly a century. In her study of Victorian Quakers, Elizabeth Isichei has already noted that the “patterns of world history have made pacifism, which was a peripheral importance in the nineteenth century, one of Quakerism's … central beliefs, and, for some, its most essential element.” The aim here is to show how this development not only transformed British Quakerism, but also gave the Society of Friends—a religious body of less than 20,000 members—a crucial role in shaping the first significant peace movement of the modern era.

Comrades Betrayed

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Nazi Persecution ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Great War

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

scholarly journals Discipline and Divinity: Colonial Quakerism, Christianity, and “Heathenism” in the Seventeenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Message

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.

scholarly journals From Durkheim to Czarnowski: Sociological Universalism and Polish Politics in the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-187
Author(s):  
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World History ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Specific Location ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great War ◽  
International Social

The Durkheimian School of sociology was one of the most comprehensive programmes ever developed in the social sciences. This article contributes to those accounts of the School that discuss its intergenerational, interdisciplinary and international transformations after the Great War. From this perspective, the article presents the case of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), whose early work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland became one of the Durkheimian classics on social integration. In the interwar period Czarnowski argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture and called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the notions of class and work. More generally, Czarnowski’s reconfiguration of Durkheimian universal principles in the specific location of East Central Europe calls for a deeper historicisation of the Durkheimian School as a movement in international social sciences.

Piracy in World History

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Maritime Security ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Laws And Regulations ◽  
Freedom Of Navigation

In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of 'legal posturing' on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in this volume highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.

Claiming Nobility in the Monarquía Hispánica: The Search for Status by Inca, Aztec, and Nasrid Descendants at the Habsburg Court

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Karoline P. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Military Orders ◽  
Habsburg Court ◽  
The Military

By the early seventeenth century, petitioners at the royal court in Madrid who claimed descent from the Inca rulers of Peru, the Aztec rulers of Mexico, and the Nasrid emirs of Granada found ways to acquire noble status and secure rights to their ancestral lands in the form of entailed estates. Their success in securing noble status and title to their mayorazgos (entailed estates) rested on strategies, used over the course of several generations, that included marriages with the peninsular nobility, ties of godparentage and patronage, and military service to the crown. This article will examine the networks formed in Madrid between roughly 1600 and 1630 when the descendants of the Inca and Aztec rulers interacted with peninsular noble families at court, obtaining noble status and entry into the military orders and establishing their mayorazgos. Their strategies for claiming nobility show striking parallels to those adopted by the Morisco nobility, and one aim of this article is to suggest how knowledge of such strategies circulated among families both at the royal court in Madrid and in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.

Military Service and Material Gain on the Ottoman–Hapsburg Frontier

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK STEIN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Economic Opportunities ◽  
Frederick Jackson Turner ◽  
Material Gain ◽  
Economic Advancement

Just over a century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous Frontier Thesis, which continues to be one of the most debated and controversial theories in historical scholarship and has affected all discussions of frontier history worldwide. This chapter explores one aspect of Turner's work that may be applicable to other frontiers — that of the frontier as a zone of economic opportunity. It discusses how military service on the seventeenth-century Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier presented a number of chances for economic advancement to men who were willing to take the risks of living and working along the border. Moving to the frontier offered economic opportunities not found in the interior. In North America, a large part of the opportunity was the potential to acquire land. It is possible that in some cases there was similar opportunity along the seventeenth-century Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Chenoweth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Background Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
British Virgin Islands ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter sketches the questions and goals of the overall project and the needed background information about Quakerism. It introduces the Tortola Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) which formed in the British Virgin Islands about 1740 and addresses how archaeology can approach the study of religion and religious communities. This chapter also serves as an introduction to Quakerism itself, including its ideology based on individual, un-mediated communion with God, and a brief history of the group from its foundation in the political and economic turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England, to the “Quietism” of wealthy “Quaker Grandees” in Philadelphia, to a nineteenth and twentieth century history of schism and reunion around pacifism. The Quaker structure of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings is introduced, and connected to both community oversight and support structures. Finally, this chapter introduces three main Quaker ideals—simplicity, equality, and peace—which will be interrogated throughout the work as they change in their interactions with Caribbean slavery and geography.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Total War ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Modern Era

This final chapter examines the cultural implications of a new century and the outbreak of the Great War for notions of masculinity. It considers the writings of commentators like Robert Baden Powell and A. C. Benson to show that questions of how best to prepare Britain’s youth to face the ‘vast energies and problems’ of the modern world were also, inevitably, questions about the role and relevance of a classical education in that process. The final section glances forward to examine the processes by which receptions of Ancient Rome persist, and are remade during the Great War and a new modern era of total war. Far from attempting to ‘finish’ the meaning of Rome or to homogenize its uses as part of a single theory of what Rome meant to the Victorian male, this chapter emphasizes the ongoing pluralities and complexities inherent in the Roman parallel.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document