ABSTRACT
Juterczenka situates eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionism in their seventeenth-century activism in Europe and earlier networks of transnational communication, while also underscoring the close connections between the missionary impulse and antislavery politics. As Juterczenka discusses, recent scholarship has highlighted the seventeenth-century roots of eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionism, and her essay explores and redefines the influence of those roots. Juterczenka links what she terms the Quaker “culture of activism” explicitly to their eighteenth-century missionizing endeavors in the German-speaking states and the Netherlands, which she suggests helps explain the pivotal role Quakers came to play in the antislavery campaign: strategies and techniques were readily available, as they had been thoroughly rehearsed since the mid-seventeenth century. These tactics were part of a larger missionary campaign that aimed at spiritual transformation on a global scale and were directly applied to antislavery activism. She also explores how religious symbolism was readily adapted to political protest and posits that this interlinked history of missions and activism still resonates in contemporary political protests.
