From the mid-nineteenth century through to the First World War, the Jewish world was re-shaped by mass migration resulting from a combination of factors—demographic and economic as well as the impact of persecution and discrimination. It was a part of a wider global shift in population from south to north and east to west that reflected the (uneven) impact of a new economic age and the forces of modernity that accompanied it. Britain, in spite of the large numbers settling there, has not featured prominently in Jewish historiography. Within the capital itself the focus has been largely on the East End at the expense of communities that developed in the West End and south of the river. This chapter provides alternative and critical narratives, thereby challenging those who limit Jewish migration to particular times and places. The dynamics of Jews on the move between and within countries and continents are far too multi-layered and intensive to be encapsulated in one story, even if as epic as the Lower East Side. It is only by incorporating the impact of Jewish migration where and when it is, perhaps, least expected that its full complexity and scope can be appreciated.

This chapter asks how it was that the concept of the indwelling Christ, or light within – in many ways a conventional, familiar and uncontentious Christian trope – set the terms and established the structure both for the scathing Quaker condemnations of their opponents and for the discourse of inclusivity and consensus among Friends. It finds an answer to this question in the ways in which the Quaker model of that inward light provided conceptual underpinning for both the ‘spirit of discernment’ and the ‘spirit of unity’ by which Friends judged those whom they encountered. The chapter analyses two defining qualities of the light, as perceived by Friends: its universality and its immanence. The universality of the light introduced a renewed and transformed sense of individual agency into the soteriological equation, as the human subject turned, was turned, or refused to turn, to that light. This agency was intensified by the insistence on its immanence, an indwelling divine presence which transformed the fallen human subject by emphasising his or her access to ‘that of God within’, thereby erasing any absolute boundary between human subject and divine presence. This erasure served to unsettle the Calvinist binary of the elect and the reprobate, producing a third constituency of human subject: those open to being turned to the light through a process of convincement.

This chapter summarises the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the author. Quakerism was one answer to the pressure and uncertainty of the dominant predestinarian position on election and reprobation. Saint and sinner were unified, co-existing in the same human subject, as in more orthodox reformed interpretations, but, for Quakers, in a different configuration. Quakerism announced the reality of a single spiritual condition: the universally present inward light, available to all. The sharply bifurcated doubleness of the human condition (those who turned to, and those who refused so to turn) hereby revealed itself to be unreliable – itself evidence of human frailty and sin, in people's refusal to accept the unity with the divine and with humanity that was delivered by an indwelling Christ. Quakers reversed the Calvinist structural dynamic of spiritual subjectivity, perceiving duality to be definitive only of the fallen human state, which masked the greater reality, both actual and potential, of divine unity.

By the First World War, Southampton was beginning to rival Liverpool as Britain's leading transmigrant port. It provided routes to north and south Atlantic destinations, especially, from the 1890s, to eastern (and, to a lesser extent, southern and northern) European migrants who had broken their journey in England. Transmigrancy was big business. It has been estimated that ‘The alien passenger, and in particular the transmigrant flows through Britain’ totalled one-third of all the passenger trade of British shipping companies. This chapter examines the memory work associated with the world's most famous ship, the Titanic, and Britain's most beloved airplane, the Spitfire—both with intimate connections to Southampton—in order to analyse the amnesia surrounding transmigrancy, and the ideological and cultural factors behind it.

Turning more directly to the pivotal figure of George Fox himself, this chapter suggests that the foundational dissolution of boundaries between human and divine established in the earlier chapters generated access to a quality in Fox and other early Friends characterised by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘sacred Self-confidence’. Taking his Journal as the focus, it examines Fox's own account of his affective transformation from an anxious seeker after truth in a predominantly Calvinist religious context to a confident, assured bearer of that truth in a world still torn between the forces of light and darkness. How, the chapter asks, did the inward light structure and direct this shift towards an unshakeable assurance in Fox, and how did it maintain it, in the face of a range of contrary pressures? How does the subjectivity constructed by the Journal negotiate not only the forces of opposition in the wider culture, but also the forces of ‘anxious masculinity’ so often found in other kinds of seventeenth-century self-inscription? The chapter locates this transformation in a relationship of ‘heteronomous agency’ predicated on the movement's conception of the indwelling Christ. It argues that this model of dependent potency established a mode of confident subjectivity rarely found in other contemporary radical religious groups.

The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are generally known today as an inclusive and tolerant movement, broadly Christian, committed to working for peace and consensus, socially activist, politically radical and culturally liberal, although, at the time of their inception in the 1650s, their reputation was less benign. This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore early Quaker discourse, comprising not only Friends' words but also their deeds. Their written testimonies, warnings and exhortations are examined, but so too are accounts of the ways that they inhabited and moved through the social and material world. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter turns to the Journal's structuring focus on Fox's journeys, and raises questions about the movement's commitment to an itinerant ministry and the ways in which, in Edward Burrough's words, ‘The worship of God in itself … is a walking with God’. While an itinerant Christian proselytising ministry was as old as the journeys of St Paul, there was none the less something unusual about the Quaker commitment to such a practice – unusual in that no other radical religious groups at the time made physical travail such a cornerstone of their modus Vivendi, but unusual too in that such restlessness sits strangely with a faith premised on the silent stillness of the meeting for worship. The chapter argues, however, that the itinerancy of Fox and other early Friends, as memorialised in the Journal, becomes itself a means of demonstrating the ceaseless presence of the indwelling Christ.

This chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to reflect on the nature of local studies and explore the key question raised by Felix Driver and Raphael Samuel of whether it is ‘possible to maintain a sense of the uniqueness of localities, and the singularity of our attachments to them, without falling prey to introverted (and ultimately exclusionary) visions of the essence or spirit of places’? It then discusses ‘local’ and minority studies; ‘race’, community and local studies; and the evolution of Cornish studies.

This chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century Quaker presence in transatlantic English colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Its starting point is a puzzling discrepancy between Quaker accounts of visits to Barbados and those to the American mainland: while the latter are detailed, complex and recognisably constructed around the same kinds of oppositions and alliances as are to be found in the accounts of English journeys, the former are short, general and often bland. Why, when the terrain, the social structures and the cultures must have been equally strange to visiting Friends, was there such a disparity of textual engagement? An answer is found in the ambivalent Quaker response to the Barbadian slave-owning economy, in which Friends themselves actively participated. While the commitment to spiritual equality was advocated as strongly as ever, there was, equally, a commitment to the status quo of the social order. Rather than the inward light dissolving the boundary between the social and the spiritual – such that the one is read as a dimension of the other, linked through the frequently reiterated assertion that God is no ‘respecter of persons’ (see Acts 10.34; Romans 2.11; Ephesians 6.9), as was more typically the case – here instead the assertion of spiritual equality is maintained separately from the upholding of a system manifestly dependent on an absolute ‘respect of’ or distinction between, persons. It is argued, therefore, that the capacity of the early Quaker conception of the inward light to dissolve boundaries and fuse categories here met an unusual and unwonted limit, with the result that the seamlessly continuous culture of the early Friends faltered in its unerringly inclusive remit.

In the period from the 1900s until the later 1930s, the Jewish population of Southampton more than tripled. According to the Jewish Year Book in 1905 there were twenty Jewish families in the town and in 1934 this had grown to sixty-five—a growth from around 100 individuals to over 300. Most of this increase was due to inward migration from other parts of Britain, most notably the East End of London. It reflected, as a pull factor, the growth of Southampton whose population increased from just over 100,000 to over 175,000 from 1901 to 1931. It also represented the push factor—the economic misery and intense competition within primary immigrant settlement areas such as the East End. While the fledgling Jewish communities of Basingstoke and Aldershot struggled to survive in the inter-war period, elsewhere in Hampshire those in Portsmouth and Bournemouth followed Southampton in receiving further influxes of east European origin Jews, many of whom had initially settled in London. It was Southampton Jewry, however, because of the late settlement of these new arrivals, that was particularly and perhaps uniquely transformed in the inter-war years. It is for this reason that the chapter focuses on this dynamic and unique south coast community.