Jay David Miller

“Quaker Jeremiad” traces the development of a unique genre of agrarian writing from the English Civil Wars to the aftermath of the American Revolution. During the seventeenth century, Quakers in England drew on longstanding Christian rhetoric about the moral economy to critique wealthy landowners who exploited poor laborers. As the movement crossed the Atlantic, Quaker writers adapted their jeremiads to address the exploitation of labor, the enslavement of Africans, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in eighteenth-century North America. “Quaker Jeremiad” revises the standard narrative about American agrarianism by shifting it away from the Jeffersonian tradition to foreground earlier writers whose work makes a rapprochement between agrarian thought and a concern for justice.