ABSTRACT
In 1762, New Jersey Quakers John Woolman and Joshua Evans each made the decision to wear only white clothing. Both men struggled with the decision. Woolman worried he would appear ‘singular’, while Evans claimed to feel ‘the terrors of hell by night and by day’ after several failed attempts to purchase a white hat. For Woolman and Evans, the decision to reject dyed clothing signalled their commitment to God and their willingness to forgo the ‘gain of oppression’. While some of their contemporaries interpreted their mode of dress as a statement of opposition to slavery, Woolman and Evans sought a broader critique of the global economy. For Woolman, Evans and other eighteenth-century Quaker reformers, slavery was both a cause and a consequence of an expanding transatlantic marketplace. In the mid-eighteenth century, Quaker reformers, including Woolman and Evans, laboured to raise awareness of an interconnected transatlantic market system that perpetuated — directly and indirectly — the enslavement of Africans. 1
