Quaker Boycotts

Conscience, Compassion or Coercion?

The following list of past boycotts supported by Quakers is not exhaustive. A fuller list has been published by the AFSC. Refusal to bear arms and to pay tithes Boycotting sugar, and other products of slavery The Temperance Movement and the rejection of “spirituous liquors" The Gandhian Home Rule Campaign The Civil Rights Movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott The boycott of Apartheid South Africa

There are clear Quaker precedents for boycotts motivated by conscience, or compassion, or coercion, or by two or three simultaneously. Where coercion has been uppermost, it was generally as part of a campaign is which Friends were outnumbered by other activists. The characteristic Quaker approach has been non-confrontational.
The current Quaker boycott of Israeli settlement goods is, of course, part of a much wider campaign against Israeli policies, in which Friends are heavily outnumbered.