Not P just Dixon

[Mark Kohut]

At the other end of the human scale is *The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The
Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist*
<https://www.guardianbookshop.com/fearless-benjamin-lay.html> (Verso) by
Marcus Rediker. Lay was an 18th-century British-born progressive who took
it on himself to point out to his fellow Quakers in Philadelphia that
keeping slaves was hardly in line with the sect’s founding principles of
brotherly equality. When arguing didn’t work, Lay staged noisy
interventions, and on one occasion even threw a bladder filled with pig’s
blood at his “covetous” co-religionists. What made this moral and physical
bravery all the more remarkable was that Lay was tiny, no more than 4ft
tall. “In his time,” concludes Rediker, “Benjamin may have been the most
radical person on the planet.” This, then, is micro-history at its best, a
careful concentration on one small man’s activities as a way of testing out
the limits of what could be thought, known and felt in the hive-mind of
early modern America.
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