David Morse is a writer and sometimes carpenter who lives in Connecticut, where he is a member of Storrs Friends Meeting. His essays and articles have appeared in diverse magazines such as The New York Times Magazine and Japan Economic Journal as well as Friends Journal, Peacework, and The Friend. He is the author of The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), a novel which centers on an actual collaboration between a Quaker and an arms-maker to build the world’s first iron bridge at England’s Severn Gorge in the 1770s. While completing the novel, Morse took an active role in building an addition onto the Storrs Friends’ meeting-house – a case of life imitating art. He is married to fellow writer Joan Joffe Hall. He can be reached at his web-site: www.david-morse.com

New England Yearly Meeting’s Committee on Prejudice and Poverty sponsored an earlier version of this essay, entitled John Woolman and the Global Economy, including photographs by Skip Schiel. It is available from FGC Bookstore.