This interview was conducted over Zoom on March 12, 2021 between Dr. Kristen Beales and Anthony Trujillo, PhD student in American Studies.
Anthony Trujillo
Good morning. It is wonderful to speak with you today. You are at the Warren Center this year working on your book manuscript which expands upon your award-winning dissertation, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to this project? Was there a particular moment or story that really seized your attention and energized your work?
Kristen Beales
Good morning and thank you. This project has its roots before I entered graduate school. After I graduated from undergrad at University of Florida, , I did an internship at Mount Vernon, where I was transcribed tobacco ledgers as part of a digital project on 18th-century economic life. At the same time, I read Frank Lambert's book, Pedlar in Divinity, on George Whitfield that looks at how the minister was able to harness and appropriate the economic changes of the 18th century to promote his ministry. I'd never really thought about the intersections of religious and economic life before but as soon as I started thinking about it, it was everywhere. And I found it so fascinating. So when I got to grad school, I read Mark Valeri’s book, Heavenly Merchandise that concludes with this group of merchants who are following George Whitfield around. That made me interested in studying the religious life of merchants, and it became the roots of my dissertation. In my book project, I'm expanding that to look more at the concept of exchange with different kinds of actors in addition to merchants. Of course, merchants aren't just doing mercantile exchanges.
Anthony
The manuscript that you're working on begins with the South Sea bubble and 1720 and ends with the Napoleonic wars in the eighteen teens. How does bring a religious lens to these economic and political crises offer a richer understanding of these two bookending events?
Kristen
Yes, the reason I started studying the South Sea Bubble began with Whitefield. While I studied the minister, I started seeing all this language of people describing him as part of a “bubble” and that made me interested in how this language of financial speculation was applied to Whitefield's ministry. I started wondering if the word “bubble” is actually purely about finance in the 18th century. The era of the South Sea Bubble is a fascinating and rich period to study, because so much of it had to do with what sort of shifting definitions of value and how we calculate value. And how we think about value raises really interesting religious questions. And then I started finding intertwined financial scandals involving companies who have roots in both London and the colonies and were deeply integrated with religious communities. So that became the start of the book project. As for ending on the Napoleonic Wars, that started off as being a section about economic regulation passed by the new United States. For merchants who claimed that their commercial practices were part of their religion, these economic regulations posed big problems. As I worked on this section, I realized that it was a story about warfare more broadly. When did commerce become war, and vice versa. And war is such a critical part of 18th century life: both the transformations of capitalism that we see in that period, and also in the transformations of religious life. So I thought that that would be a good place to finish.
Anthony
The title of your manuscript is Spirited Exchanges: The Religion of the Marketplace in Early America. What economies do you see at work? What are the “goods” that are being exchanged, and between whom? And what kinds of relationships are being established among different groups and classes of people through these economies?
Kristen
I’ll start with the “goods.” One of the things I've really liked about this study is seeing all of the different types of goods that are being exchanged. It is interesting to me to see how different types of objects—from mundane things like barrel staves to church organs--could facilitate religious interaction. In the eighteenth-century, the word “commerce” conjured up just not economic practices, but also social exchanges. One of the things that I find so interesting is in the process of exchanging something even as simple as a barrel, it that raises all of logistical questions, and it raises potentially moral challenges as well. And it reveals all of these moments of interaction for people who might not otherwise be interacting with one another.
For example, I was working on an example of a Boston merchant, Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman who was a remarkable Anglican female merchant in mid-century Boston. She had commercial relationships with dry goods merchants in London that start off as being purely about ordering materials. They eventually evolved into these religious friendships where they spend a lot of time talking in their commercial correspondence about the nature of God. So you have that type of religious friendship that's facilitated through economic exchanges. By shifting my focus from merchants to things being exchanged also shifts the focus from just commercial goods but to other types of exchanges that are going on.
Anthony
That rolls into my next question: What patterns of change do you see in the way religion or religious discourse is being mobilized in service of commerce over the course of the 18th century? Or put another way, what changes do you seen in what you call Christianized commerce?
Kristen
That's a big question that I've really been grappling with right now. The big chronological shift I'm charting is the emergence of and contest over what I call “Christianized commerce” where merchants would make these arguments that because they were Christians, everything they did was Christian as well, and how they used this as a way to think about their own economic interactions. Christianized commerce gave people this incredible confidence people that they could indeed harness the powers of the marketplace for Christian good. One of the things that I'm trying to show is that “Christianized commerce” was always contested. There are people who reject this for a variety of reasons; is not a neat, chronological arc, but a messy dialogue.
This was an argument that I made at first by looking exclusively at white male merchants. Some of the most vocal proponents of Christianized commerce in my project are white male slave traders. I’m also thinking about how this then migrates, because you eventually see abolitionists and other types of people picking up on this argument. As I'm expanding sort of the source base for this project, I’m wondering if Christianized commerce is a transformation rooted in these merchants? Or is this something broader going on in society?
Anthony
Can you talk about the different moral views of the people you’re considering toward commerce as a Christian activity?
Kristen
In the section that I'm circulating, I’m looking at three different responses to these religious revivals in the 1740s. One is a lumber merchant, who is concerned that his time on the wharf is going to affect his religious practice. The wharf work is stressful, it's awful, and it's always threatening to encroach on his religion. There’s a tailor who has this dramatic religious experience and tries to work as an awakened tailor. He's doing an age-old craft; he's working with his hands; this doesn't seem like something that would be spiritually dangerous. But he concludes: nope, this just isn't happening, I can't do it. And then there is a merchant who is able to combine these things pretty seamlessly. He has no moral qualms about what he's doing. Which is just fascinating to me.
Anthony
I am wondering how you’re thinking about corporations and capitalism in this time period? And I'm curious as to how you see your work elucidating the more material manifestations of “spirit” and the more spiritual manifestations of the corporation? And how does this shape a fuller understanding of what capitalism is or capital is and how capitalism works?
Kristen
That's an interesting question for a couple of reasons. The corporation actually plays a pretty small role in my current project. Hopefully my second project will focus exclusively on corporations and some of those very questions that you're talking about. Last year at Case Western Reserve University I taught a class that was basically structured around the question: what is the relationship between Christianity and corporations, and how has this changed over time? And we spent a lot of time tracing these medieval debates about whether a corporation can be excommunicated. What is created when a group of people formed together as one entity? What are the legal political, economic, religious consequences of that type of formation?
As for capital, during my dissertation defense I was asked a question that has stayed with me and that I'm thinking through as I've been revising the project. That is about the relationship between older definitions of wealth as landed wealth and the importance of land in wealth generation, and then the shift to increasingly complex methods and means of financial capitalism over the course of the 18th century. And so I’ve been looking at connections between different forms of wealth generation. My project actually begins by looking at a Quaker company, the Pennsylvania Land Company, that's rooted in London and it's based on speculating on Pennsylvania land. It's interesting looking at the different ways that people are approaching this from those who are based in London and doing dealing with land in the abstract, as compared to the people who are in Pennsylvania and going out and surveying the land and really engaging with it. Part of this story is about the miscommunications that develop as a result and the different ways of thinking about wealth that land generates.
Anthony
That makes me wonder about the geographic reach of your project and how are you working across geographies? Can you talk a little about that?
Kristen
The geography is something that I've thought quite a bit about and how I'm going to balance the local and the global. So much of religious life is intensely local, especially in the 18th century. This tailor that I'm looking at, for example, lives his life between Boston and Cambridge, and that is his religious community. That is where he lives, that is where he works, that is everything. It is interesting putting his life in dialogue with those of some of the merchants I study who are traveling all over the globe. To try to balance these perspectives, I’ve tried to pair chapters that look at global and local developments. So in this section, I have one chapter I have looks at the global connections; how religious denominations are shaping the experience of mercantile exchange and how these mercantile exchanges are then knitting together geographically dispersed co-religionists. Then I have two chapters focused on religion in the workplace with a hyperlocal look at the religious meaning of the spaces people are surrounded by.
There is a source base challenge built into this. Most of my project is based on letters, meaning that I have often have a much better understanding of the relationships between people who are separated across vast differences than I do of their relationships with their local friends and family. Balancing these perspectives has required some creative archival work.
Anthony
Is there an aspect of your project that strikes you as having particular resonance today?
Kristen
I think it is very interesting to trace what is seen as spiritually safe and spiritually problematic over time. One of the things that surprised me is that a lot of the people who turn to the stock market in the 18th century saw it as being spiritually safe. This is a way that you can put your money somewhere safe where you don't have to deal with it. You don't have to worry about how you're going to be entangled in these broader day-to-day aspects of engaging in economic life. You let someone else deal with it and let your money grow. There were elements of it that were certainly threatening to people, but for the most part, the people I study saw the stock market as a potentially Christian answer to money management problems.
Related to that, too, is how this notion of Christianized commerce becomes so naturalized over the course of the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. For example, that Chick-Fil-A can be seen as a site of Christian service and that Hobby Lobby can have religious beliefs. Looking at the 18th century really shows what a dramatic transformation happens, for instance with the tailor who cannot possibly conceptualize of his workplace as a place to share his religion. That makes very little sense, I think to a 21st century mind.
Anthony
This brings me to the last question. How has engaging with the Warren center this Warren center community this year been important for you and your scholarship?
Kristen
It has been incredibly important. I've spent most of my academic career in early America-focused circles. I was at Williams and Mary, which is across the street from Colonial Williamsburg. And so I think spending time with the Fellows in the Warren Center has really helped me think about how my work is in dialogue with broader scholarly conversations. I'm still very much rooted in early America, but being part of this program, I’ve thought a lot about how my work connects to the broader conversations happening in both history and religious studies right now. Another thing too, is that I've been so focused on my work as being about the intersection of religion and economics. But I hadn't really thought about the “public life” element too much before I came here. But as I'm revising my manuscripts, so much of it has to do with religion and public, religion and politics. And then, again, with this tailor that I've been working with, he's super concerned about practicing his religion in public, because he thinks that if he does, that, people are going to think he's doing it for self-serving purposes, right; that he's just trying to show off if anyone sees him being religious. And I think about that very differently now, because of the conversations we've been having.
Anthony
Well, thank you, Kristen for taking the time to talk today. This has really been a wonderful conversation. It is great to hear about the questions and interests you are bringing to your and about some of the stories we have to look forward to in your paper and presentation.
Kristen
Thank you as well. It has been lovely speaking with you.
This interview was transcribed using Otter.ai and edited for brevity by both parties.