The Peace Society, International Peace Society or London Peace Society, originally known as the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, was a pioneering British pacifist organisation that was active from 1816 until the 1930s.
The Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace was founded after a meeting at the premises of William Allen, in Plough Court, Lombard Street in the City of London on 14 June 1816. Following the Battle of Waterloo the previous year and the decades of European conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte, it advocated a gradual, proportionate, and simultaneous disarmament of all nations and the principle of arbitration. [1] Many of the founders came together under the banner of Christian abolitionism and a number were Quakers.
The society in London helped establish auxiliary societies in various cities and towns across the United Kingdom; for instance at Doncaster and Leeds, [2] Swansea and Neath, Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bath, Bristol, Coventry, Exeter, Darlington, Leicester, Hull, Plymouth and Southampton; to name but a few. It published a monthly journal, The Herald of Peace, which was first printed in 1819. [3] [4]
On 25 May 1836 the society held their twentieth anniversary meeting at the Exeter Hall on London's Strand. In 1843 they hosted the first International Peace Congress.
Between 1817 and 1833 the society issued twelve tracts for its membership, which ran to multiple editions:
In 1842, the Peace Society produced 4,000 additional copies of the earlier that year published book War and Peace: the Evils of the First with a Plan for Securing the Last by William Jay for the 1842 Conference of the Friends of Peace. [6]
Lewis Appleton organized the International Arbitration and Peace Association (IAPA) in 1880. [7] Unlike the Peace Society the IAPA accepted defensive war, was not restricted to Christians and claimed to be international. [8] It also allowed women on the executive committee.
In the spring of 1882, E. M. Southey, the main founder of the Ladies Peace Association, persuaded her group to disaffiliate from the Peace Society and join the IAPA. The Quaker Priscilla Hannah Peckover played a central role in organizing a new ladies auxiliary of the Peace Society that was launched on 12 July 1882. [9] During the 1880s the Peace Society stagnated. Its Ladies' Peace Association was more dynamic, and claimed 9,217 members by the summer of 1885, of which 4,000 belonged to Peckover's Wisbech group. [10]
The society's failure to condemn the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 resulted in internal divisions and led to the resignation of its leader, Rev. William Evans Darby. His successor, Rev. Herbert Dunnico, led the society's unsuccessful campaign for peace negotiations. [1]
In 1930 the Peace Society merged with the International Christian Peace Fellowship and was renamed the International Peace Society. At sometime thereafter, with the Second World War looming and growing public unease towards British government policies of appeasement, it became defunct.
As listed in The Origins of War Prevention by Martin Ceadel, [11] the founding dozen in 1816 were:
There are also records at the Savings Bank Museum, [21] in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, as the founder of the first parish savings bank Henry Duncan wrote on this subject.
Thomas Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended British trade in slaves.
The International Arbitration and Peace Association (IAPA) was an organisation founded in London in 1880 with the stated objective of promoting arbitration and peace in place of armed conflicts and force. It published a journal, Concord.
Joseph Sturge was an English Quaker, abolitionist and activist. He founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. He worked throughout his life in Radical political actions supporting pacifism, working-class rights, and the universal emancipation of slaves. In the late 1830s, he published two books about the apprenticeship system in Jamaica, which helped persuade the British Parliament to adopt an earlier full emancipation date. In Jamaica, Sturge also helped found Free Villages with the Baptists, to provide living quarters for freed slaves; one was named Sturge Town in his memory.
William Allen was an English scientist and philanthropist who opposed slavery and engaged in schemes of social and penal improvement in early 19th-century England.
Joseph Pease was a British proponent and supporter of the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company, one of first public railway systems in the world, and was the first Quaker permitted to take his seat in Parliament.
The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, founded in 1823 and known as the London Anti-Slavery Society during 1838 before ceasing to exist in that year, was commonly referred to as the Anti-Slavery Society.
The Pease family is an English and mostly Quaker family associated with Darlington, County Durham, and North Yorkshire, descended from Edward Pease of Darlington (1711–1785). They were 'one of the great Quaker industrialist families of the nineteenth century, who played a leading role in philanthropic and humanitarian interests'. They were heavily involved in woollen manufacturing, banking, railways, locomotives, mining, and politics.
William Forster was a preacher, Quaker elder and a fervent abolitionist. He was an early member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. It was William and Stephen Grellet who introduced Elizabeth Fry to her life's work with prisons, but it was William's brother, Josiah, who accompanied Fry on her tour and inspection of prisons in France.
Anne Knight was an English social reformer, abolitionist and pioneer of feminism. She attended the 1840 Anti-Slavery convention, where the need to improve women's rights became obvious. In 1847 Knight produced what is thought to be the first leaflet for women's suffrage and formed the first UK women's suffrage organisation in Sheffield in 1851.
'Free Village is the term used for Caribbean settlements, particularly in Jamaica, founded in the 1830s and 1840s with land for freedmen with independence of the control of plantation owners and other major estates. The concept was initiated by English Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, who raised funds in Great Britain to buy land to be granted to freedmen after emancipation. The planters had vowed not to sell any land to freedmen after slavery was finally abolished in the Empire in 1838; they wanted to retain freedmen as agricultural workers. The Free Villages were often founded around a Baptist church, and missionaries worked to found schools as well in these settlements.
Elizabeth Heyrick was an English philanthropist and campaigner against the slave trade. She supported immediate, rather than gradual, abolition.
Josiah Forster was an English teacher and philanthropist. He was an early member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and a supporter of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Both he and his wife were senior figures in the British Quakers.
Elizabeth Nichol was an English abolitionist, anti-segregationist, woman suffragist, chartist and anti-vivisectionist. She was active in the Peace Society, the Temperance movement and founded the Darlington Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. In 1853 she married Dr. John Pringle Nichol (1804–1859), Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. She was one of about six women who were in the painting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840.
Sturge may refer to:
William Smeal (1792–1877) was a grocer and an abolitionist Quaker from Glasgow.
Priscilla Hannah Peckover was an English Quaker, pacifist and linguist from a prosperous banking family. After helping to raise the three daughters of her widowed brother, in her forties she became involved in the pacifist movement.
John Scott was an English banker, evangelical Christian and pacifist. He was a founder member of the Peace Society in London, and was associated with the anti-slavery movement and various abolitionist figures of the day.
Thomas Sturge the Elder was a London tallow chandler, oil merchant, spermaceti processor and philanthropist. He was a Quaker.
Sophia Sturge was a British slavery abolitionist based in Birmingham. She was a founding member of the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves and devoted much of her life to supporting her brother who was one of the UK's leading abolitionists.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Wood, James, ed. (1907). "Peace Society". The Nuttall Encyclopædia . London and New York: Frederick Warne.