London Friends

Londoners first encountered Friends in the autumn of 1654, when Quaker missionaries to the city reported successes among groups of Seekers and Baptists. During 1657 and 1658 the Quaker headquarters moved from Swarthmoor, Cumbria, to the capital. London presented an ideal base for an Atlantic-wide faith. Together, the metropolis's political and economic pre-eminence would shape the Quaker community – and vice versa. Home to the emerging empire's political leadership, it allowed the Meeting for Sufferings to lobby Parliament and the Crown on behalf of Friends’ interests. The city's centrality for the growing colonial trades facilitated easy communication with Friends in the Americas.

London had held a central place in the English economy for centuries. Its prosperity was based on the presence of the court, Parliament and the central law courts. It was the country's biggest manufacturing centre as well as a hub for local and foreign trade. During the early modern period the city emerged as first the nation’s, and then Europe's pre-eminent port. London merchants led England's participation in long-distance trade in the second half of the seventeenth century. Particularly important became trade with the American colonies. During the 1640s, colonists introduced sugar into Barbados. It proved a huge success. European indentured servants and an ever-increasing number of enslaved Africans worked the plantations. Over the course of the following decades, England expanded its possessions in the Caribbean, and with this grew the production of sugar and tobacco. As demand for plantation produce grew, so did the enslaved population in the Caribbean: while in 1660 there were 34,000 enslaved African men, women and children toiling in the English West Indies, by 1700 their number had grown to 115,000. By that time, almost 20 per cent of London's imports consisted of plantation produce, part of which was re-exported to continental Europe. In exchange, London merchants exported English manufactured goods to the Caribbean. These made up 15 per cent of the metropolis's total exports.

The plantation economies continued to expand over the course of the eighteenth century. To supply them with cheap labour, Britain became the world's largest slave trading nation. The trade in slaves and slave-produced goods fuelled the growth of the middle class. This group forged a communal identity through consumption.