Change in the Quaker business environment 1800–1948

Sleapwood, Nicola (2024). Change in the Quaker business environment 1800–1948. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis assesses change in the Quaker business community in Britain over the long period 1800–1948. It establishes a model for defining a Quaker business to assist in future research, and seeks to query notions of business success. I use a range of sources and methods and a largely chronological approach to draw out different strands of change over time. My earliest primary sources are the books of discipline of the Religious Society of Friends, which guided and regulated behaviour in its early history. By combining an analysis of the discipline around business with a consideration of Quakers’ business activities and the practice of the discipline, I show the impact on the Society and its reputation of Quaker interactions with new business forms and speculation in the early to mid-nineteenth century. I use a local case study of the Birmingham business community at this time to further demonstrate this, and to highlight the strength of Quaker business networks, locally and nationally, and how this trusting relationship benefits business.
My conviction that, based so much on personal faith, religious business history is also personal means that I highlight the cases of particular individuals, including Joseph Gibbins in the early nineteenth century, and the stories of two cousins and the family business they enter as young men in the late nineteenth century. These latter individuals, William Arthur Albright and John William Wilson, and the story of their firm and their differences draw out further loci of change. These are principally changes in company form and its associated importing of external management, and the devastating impact of World War I on the Quaker business environment. Throughout my thesis I bear in mind theological change in Quakerism and I argue that this change combines with the decline in the application of the discipline and leads to its replacement with a conversation which continues into the mid-twentieth century, but is ultimately inconclusive.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):