The most obvious possible explanation for Quakers’ reputation for exceptional honesty in business is that they had a distinct, superior set of business ethics. Indeed, Quaker historians have traditionally argued this. Quaker business ethics are supposed to have evoked trust in their trading partners. Thereby they provided Friends with a competitive advantage in business, facilitating Friends’ trade in the deceitful, low-trust environment that was the early modern economy. These claims however lack empirical substantiation, and have begun to meet with scepticism. This chapter investigates the content of Quaker business ethics and compares them to those of the contemporary British mainstream.

The historical development of business ethics

The comparative literature on the historical development of business ethics is still limited. Max Weber famously argued that Calvinism introduced to Europe a rational, methodical and controlled thriving for individual economic betterment, including the virtues of reliability, honesty and punctuality in business, thereby supporting the development of capitalism. His work on the protestant ethic has fuelled scholarly debates for almost a century, incurring a fair amount of criticism. R. H. Tawney argued that Weber underestimated the evolution of Calvinism from community-enforced asceticism to highly individualistic cultures encouraging the pursuit of wealth through industry, thrift and diligence. As he argued, Puritanism gave these virtues ‘a supernatural sanction, [and] turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion’. While Weber proposed that Calvinism pioneered the idea of diverting humans’ ‘passions’ towards the individual pursuit of wealth, Hirschman located this in a different source. He argued that early modern philosophers, including Montesquieu and Stewart, proposed the economic virtues of frugality, moderation, work, order, regularity and individual pursuit of wealth as a means of achieving political stability, and that these virtues preceded Calvinism. However, while influenced by Calvinist and Puritan ideas, Quakerism in fact rejected their core belief in predestination. Instead Quakers emphasized individual agency as the route to salvation.

The Dissemination of Business Ethics

Norms are instilled, beginning in childhood, through social networks, kinship groups, or religious or ethnic communities. While much of this process is informal and difficult to study for historical communities, there are formal processes of dissemination of norms which can be traced.