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The Fearless Benjamin Lay The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist![]() Stock informationGeneral Fields
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Local DescriptionReview: Benjamin Lay was a Quaker, a philosopher, a sailor, a commoner and a revolutionary abolitionist. Crossing the seas from Colchester to Philadelphia and beyond he spoke truth to power and, as a little person, waged a politics of the body in his everyday life. His antinomian radicalism has been wonderfully excavated by Marcus Rediker in this eloquent testament. -- Catherine Hall, author of Legacies of British Slave-Ownership and Civilising Subjects
Author Biography: Marcus Rediker (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the College d'etudes mondiales in Paris. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Peter Linebaugh), The Slave Ship, and The Amistad Rebellion. He produced the award-winning documentary film Ghosts of Amistad (Tony Buba, director), about the popular memory of the Amistad rebellion of 1839 in contemporary Sierra Leone. DescriptionThe Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man-a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life. |