The extraordinary story of one of the first British men to oppose slavery

The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man-a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theatre to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He wrote a fiery, controversial book against bondage that Benjamin Franklin published in 1738. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, refused to consume anything produced by slave labour, championed animal rights, and embraced vegetarianism. He acted on his ideals to create a new, practical, revolutionary way of life.

"Like most satisfying biographies, Rediker's is part group biography, offering sketches of the lives with which Lay's intersected." - Times Literary Supplement

"It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the odd one might have heard of Benjamin Lay. But if anyone deserves to muscle in on the mildly self-congratulatory and largely middle-class pantheon of Abolitionist Saints, it is the gloriously improbable and largely forgotten Quaker throwback and hero of Marcus Rediker's generous and absorbing act-his own phrase-of 'retrospective justice'." - Spectator

"Rediker has done a valuable service in rescuing Lay from obscurity ... I suspect there will be few readers who won't want to boil a celebratory turnip to salute what Benjamin Lay achieved in the course of his long and remarkable life." - Daily Mail

"This 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." - Guardian, best biographies of the year 2017

"It is a pretty safe bet that people reading this excellent biography of the Quaker radical Benjamin Lay will not have heard of him or his exploits. Hopefully because of Marcus Rediker's hard work and perseverance more people will now know of this extraordinary figure." - A Trumpet of Sedition

"Historian Marcus Rediker's excellent book, published last year, illuminates the life of this extraordinary man ... the first-known white radical abolitionists." - New Statesman