Bulletin n. 1/2017 | ||
June 2017 | ||
Carp Benjamin L. |
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“Fix’d almost amongst Strangers”: Charleston’s Quaker Merchants and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism | ||
in William and Mary Quarterly , Volume 74, n. 1, january , 2017 | ||
Eighteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina, was steeped in luxury and slavery and proved an awkward home for the small community of Quaker merchants who did business there in the early 1770s. These travelers experienced profound displacement as they grappled with the lived experience of cosmopolitanism. In striving for worldly acceptance, universal humanity, or both, “port Quakers” and other people of the Atlantic world faced stark choices. Some, such as Joseph Atkinson, pursued profit and gentility; others, such as Samuel Rowland Fisher, retreated into insularity and particularism; a third group, such as William Dillwyn, aspired to activism and transatlantic reform. Atkinson, Fisher, and Dillwyn all experienced disorientation and frustration—something more than homesickness—as life in Charleston confronted them with the pluralism of the Atlantic world. | ||