b'But although some of us, that are Negroe Masters and Traders, do allow that the beginning of this Practice was of the Devil, and that he and we his Instruments are now carrying of it on very powerfully, and as it had a beginning there in Hell, so it must have an End. . .I know no worse or greater stumbling Blocks the Devil has to lay in the way of honest Inquirers, than our Ministers and Elders keeping Slaves; and by straining and perverting Holy Scriptures, Preach more to Hell, than ever they will bring to Heaven, by their feigned Humility and Hypocrisy. . . 15Similar questions about markets and ethics were raised during the same epoch by John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, in his sermons about The Use of Money: We should not gain all we can by causing injury to another, whether to his trade, his body or his soul. We should not sell our goods below their market price nor should we entice away, or receive, the workers that a brother has need of. It is quite wrong to make a living from selling those things which would harm a neighbors health. For a time, Methodists eschewed investing in the stock market altogether, considering it to be gambling. Later, Method-ists and Quakers developed ethical guidelines for investing, centered primarily on avoiding investments in so-called sin stocks, such as alcohol, tobacco and weapons manufacturers.This philosophical thread was carried forward by artist and social philosopher John Ruskin in the 19th century. He coined the term illth to distinguish true wealth from its false cousin, questioning the morality of accumulating wealth without accounting for its social and environmental costs. 15 Lay was thus the first to articulate a modern politics of consumption. He boycotted all slave-produced commodities, which always disguised the horrific conditions under which they were produced. Anyone who dropped a cube of sugar into a cup of tea was thereby complicit with the sugar-planters of Barbados and the tea-plantation owners in East Asia, with their violent means of creating wealth. To refuse sugar, in turn, was to express solidarity with oppressed enslaved workers in the Caribbean, and to acknowledge that sugar was made with their blood. The modern global movement against sweatshops is based on the same idea. https://aeon.co/essays/the-abolitionist-benjamin-lay-was-a-hero-ahead-of-his-time31'