Matthew Kadane's "watchful clothier" was Joseph Ryder, a merchant who spent his entire life (1695-1768) in the north of England at the center of Britain's emerging textile industry. As a dyer in Leeds, Ryder worked at a crucial midpoint in the complicated "putting out" system that structured the industry. He relied on money-lenders for the capital to purchase unfinished cloth, which had been transformed from wool on the spinning wheels and looms of outlying villagers. Ryder stood to make a better living than his suppliers when the cloth he dyed found buyers in Leeds' Mixed Cloth Hall (and its predecessor markets). At the end of his active but stressful career, Ryder enjoyed a local reputation as a figure of more than average wealth and higher than common probity.
The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
Yale University Press
312 pages
$62.99
Joseph Ryder's place in recorded history does not rest on his mercantile success, but rather on the diaries that he kept from May 1733 to almost the end of his life 35 years later. In 41 pocket-sized notebooks of over twelve thousand pages and approximately 2.5 million words, Ryder left an extraordinary record of his internal life that, until Matthew Kadane's meticulously documented book, lay mostly under-studied in the John Rylands Library of Manchester University. While others had exploited these materials for their own research interests, no one before Kadane, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, had studied the diaries primarily for themselves and their author. The results are every bit as instructive as from Matthew Lundin's recently published study of a similarly massive personal archive left by the 16th-century Nuremberg lawyer Hermann Weinsberg.[1]
Kadane's explanation for why "watchfulness" best summarizes the life of this "eighteenth-century Protestant capitalist" reveals a great deal about Nonconforming Dissenter church life in a tumultuous era of economic, intellectual, and religious transition. Even more, with the diaries' nonpareil record for the inner life of a dedicated lay Christian, the book charts the particular challenge that "modernity" has posed for believers of all sorts and in all places.
This admirably pious Dissenter maintained exquisitely detailed watchfulness for his soul in the midst of its business activities, but almost no watchfulness about the ways and means of those practices themselves.
Throughout his life, Ryder remained, in Kadane's words, "a compulsive church-goer." Yet religion meant far more than regular worship with the Call Lane Independents (or Congregationalists) and the Mill Hill Presbyterians, two Leeds chapels that had arisen in the late 17th century as Dissenting holdouts against the Anglican conformity imposed by the Restoration in 1660 after civil war and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. In Kadane's careful definition, the "watchfulness" recorded in the diaries (it was a term Ryder used often) meant "a relentless, self-perpetuating, and salvational examination of the self, the external world, the divine, and the very process of examination." For Ryder it was the Puritan's traditional "doctrine of providence put into daily, diligent, and often written practice." As the diaries reveal, Ryder ordered his life around his faith, disciplined his thoughts by Christian precepts, studied the Scriptures ceaselessly, reflected constantly on the spiritual meaning of his daily round, and sought by every psychic means possible to assess his day-to-day standing before God. The approximately five thousand worship services Ryder documented supported his daily devotional existence, rather than the other way around.
Ryder's comprehensive record-keeping sheds much light on important 18th-century developments that are usually narrated from the top down. The diaries show a serious layman, eager to maintain the Puritan vision he had embraced but buffeted from many directions. Because his own lifelong devotion to the Bible remained a personal spiritual anchor, he was distressed when liberal theological innovators pushed biblical interpretations toward the Enlightenment and away from Puritanism. Toward the end of his life, the Mill Hill Presbyterians welcomed a young Unitarian minister named Joseph Priestley, who later became famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his chemical experiments but also for his decidedly unorthodox dismissal of the Trinity. At the Leeds Presbyterian chapel Ryder was witnessing a momentous intellectual transformation, which Kadane describes as "a watchful God" become "a watchmaker."
On the other side of the religious ledger, Ryder never found the new evangelicalism of George Whitefield and John Wesley particularly appealing. While he appreciated any effort to promote a biblical message of salvation, he worried that the revivalists' constant travels betrayed a dangerous instability. Ryder wrote with great concern about attacks on original sin and predestination that became more common in the Dissenting chapels he frequented, but his innate conservatism and melancholic personality also left him cold to evangelical innovations.
Kadane skillfully highlights the reasons why "Old Dissent"—the Puritan-descended Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists that predated the rise of Methodism—could retain such a strong emotional hold on its adherents. A primary reason was mortality. Ryder's diaries record hundreds of deaths among his fellow Leeds Dissenters and in the wider circles touching these two congregations. A "junkie for funerals," in Kadane's phrase, Ryder was buoyed up by his strong personal faith through the often premature departures of so many who were near and dear, including his own wife Elisabeth, who died in 1754. That same faith also moved him to many acts of altruistic care for families who bore these losses. In Kadane's depiction, Ryder's life is a beacon illuminating a sturdy cohort of British Christianity that the excitements of theological conflict and evangelical awakening have obscured.
The wider importance of Ryder's story concerns his watchfulness as a merchant. Kadane's account of a mid-level Protestant at work in the early stages of modern consumer capitalism deals, as all such studies must, with Max Weber. Kadane's careful research into the circumstances of Ryder's life equips him for discerning judgment about Weber's famous claim concerning an "elective affinity" between Calvinist theological conviction and modern capitalist instincts. If Ryder's life does support Weber's general picture of religious and economic interaction, Kadane finds that interaction far too complex for simplistic assessment of religious cause for economic effect, or vice versa.
For Christian assessment, the important questions lie elsewhere. Joseph Ryder's life underscores the astute conclusions of Mark Valieri's recent study of New England's economic life in the 17th and 18th centuries.[2] In his splendidly researched book, Valeri showed that as New England's history unfolded, personal piety, biblical conviction, and general religious seriousness remained strong. Yet, crucially, as the decades passed, these Puritans more and more accepted the structures of British economic development without a further thought. They remained dedicated students of Scripture, but—in contrast to the first New England generations—they did not bring Scripture to bear for assessment or discipline of the mercantile practices that had come to prevail in the expanding British Empire.
Joseph Ryder seemed much the same. His diaries overflow with watchfulness concerning the effects of his business on his personal standing before God: Is he more concerned with worldly achievement than his eternal destiny? Has he taken unwarranted pride in his mercantile success? Is he using his wealth for godly purposes or hoarding it selfishly for himself? "Considering with what pains & difficulty I see many persons Obtain the means of Livelihood" (to quote one of many such entries, p. 96), has he kept himself unspotted from the world?
What the diaries do not record, however, are questions about the system that provided his livelihood. He did not, for example, seem to worry about the justice of the military ventures that expanded Britain's empire, and thus expanded the trading opportunities from which a diligent clothier could profit. He never commented on the crucial role that slavery and the slave trade played in stimulating the international exchanges that fueled the demand for finished cloth. Although Ryder displayed unusual generosity in opening his home to several generations of apprentices, he did not comment on how the increasing centralization of cloth manufacturing squeezed out small-scale operators and brought distress to their families. In other words, this admirably pious Dissenter maintained exquisitely detailed watchfulness for his soul in the midst of its business activities, but almost no watchfulness about the ways and means of those practices themselves.
Readers should not expect Matthew Kadane to address such broader concerns. His deeply researched and gracefully written volume stands very well on its own. Among those who read it with appreciation, some may conclude that Ryder's personal watchfulness offers positive traits to emulate, along with a few (especially obsessive introspection) to avoid. But they may also go further to wonder about what it would have taken to bring a similar watchfulness to bear on the economic and imperial systems that Leeds' pious clothier, as a Christian merchant at home in the modern economic system, simply took for granted—and what it would require of a believer to exercise such watchfulness today.
Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian's Discovery of the Global Christian Story, just published by Baker Academic.
1. See the review of Lundin's Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes his World (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012) by Ronald Rittgers, Books & Culture, November/December 2013, pp. 36-37.
2. Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), reviewed by Lauren Winner in Books & Culture, November/December 2010, pp. 27-29.
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