John Woolman’s Intersecting Testimonies against Enslavement, Colonialism and the Rum Trade

John Woolman built upon Quaker principles and earlier critiques by Friends in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to oppose enslavement and the rum trade among members of the Religious Society of Friends. By the 1760s, after the devastation of the Seven Years’ War, he recognised how English colonisation had destroyed Native communities, linking colonialism with enslavement and rum. Woolman located these intersecting inequities in the focus of English families on acquiring and perpetuating wealth. Unlike his public testimony against involuntary bondage, his writings against colonialism in his journal and essay ‘A Plea for the Poor’ remained unpublished until after his death. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .