World of Trouble delivers on Godbeer's promise to unearth the “public and private worlds” (8–9) of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, two prominent Quakers whose lives, like so many others, were upended by the American Revolution. The book's title refers to the suffering that plagued the Drinkers in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. This was a world where physicians prescribed laudanum, blistering, and bleeding for common and more serious ailments, often with deadly results. The Drinkers endured two miscarriages and the deaths of four out of nine children—not atypical for the time. Even without the war, illness and death were constant companions, an experience shared by wealthy and poor alike. Religious faith provided comfort, or at least a sense of resignation. “How fluctuating and uncertain is everything in this transitory world,” Elizabeth wrote in 1807, after receiving news that her son's mother-in-law passed away, one of many deaths she endured in her lifetime (355).

Elizabeth Drinker is well known among historians thanks to her diary, which spans several decades and is one of the few authored by a woman that is still extant. Godbeer uses her diary, among a myriad of other sources, to great effect. Elizabeth appears competent and courageous. One gets the sense that she would have been better suited running the family's merchant business—or at least more so than Henry, whose poor business judgement and misplaced trust in incompetent managers left him with insurmountable debts at the end of his life. After Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council exiled Henry to Virginia for suspected loyalist sympathies, patriot committees threatened Elizabeth and levied demands for supplies. A British officer from the Royal Highland Regiment also quartered in her home for a time. Fortunately for Elizabeth, the officer behaved tolerably; the indignities she suffered amounted to nothing more than the house “being used for schemes of pleasure that were inconsistent with Quaker notions of propriety” (165)—by which Godbeer meant that the officer entertained and socialized with his colleagues at all hours of the night. Godbeer does not mention this, but the fact that soldiers on both sides of the war raped women with relative impunity must not have been far from Elizabeth's mind. The threat of physical violence was ever present. One soldier who “courted” one of Elizabeth's servants brandished his sword in Elizabeth's kitchen. He was disarmed by a family friend, but, as Godbeer notes, “it could have ended in bloodshed” (161).

Henry was more quixotic than his wife. In public, Henry postured as the head of the household; in private, he was emotionally dependent on Elizabeth. It was Henry who penned the most romantic line in the book, telling Elizabeth in a letter while exiled in Virginia that “I retain you near my heart” (178). Elizabeth's sarcasm was equally biting and effective. In noting the patriot government's hasty prosecution of Samuel Fisher, a fellow Quaker, for suspected espionage, she conveyed her outrage at the perceived hypocrisy of her revolutionary neighbors with just two words in her diary: “fine liberty” (201).

While Godbeer pays attention to servants and enslaved people, his book is not quite a history from below. We see the world mostly through Henry and Elizabeth's eyes. The Revolution raised expectations, particularly among Philadelphia's laboring classes, including black and white servants, yet Elizabeth “hankered after a past, however real or imagined, in which the household had a more stable structure, a tight-knit hierarchical family rather than a series of business arrangements lacking any sense of sustained commitment or deference on the part of employees” (291). The Drinkers were capable of affection toward their servants, but Henry and Elizabeth expected deference in return, and when they perceived it was not forthcoming, they turned contemptuous and indignant. Godbeer is nuanced on this point, noting that Elizabeth made comments about African Americans that were “explicitly racist, though she did not aim these barbs against her own servants. Her disposition toward people of color was complicated” (279). As Quakers, the Drinkers were antislavery, but, like many other white Americans during this time, they were uncomfortable with assertions of black independence or racial mixing of any kind. When a black driver, an employee, fathered a child with one of their servants, a young white woman around sixteen years of age, Elizabeth handed the baby over to white caretakers living outside of Philadelphia. The Drinkers fired the driver, but when he returned to the neighborhood looking for the mother of his child, Henry beat him with a cane and told him he would “lay him by the heels” if he ever returned (266).

One of the strengths of World of Trouble is that it underscores that eighteenth-century Americans adhered to different understandings of peace and that they were sometimes willing to fight and kill, if necessary, over it. Examples of this abound in the book. Godbeer notes the extent to which patriot committees targeted Quaker pacifists as suspected loyalists. After the British surrendered at Yorktown, for instance, mobs vandalized Quaker homes because the occupants had refused to participate in the public celebrations. Patriots displaced the king's peace with a newer, revolutionary peace—calling it the “patriot's peace”—that demanded public obedience. Godbeer rightly points out that the “commitment to pacifism caused the most trouble” for Friends during the Revolution, owing to their public refusal to bear arms, which left them vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and treason (91). Henry and twenty other men, many of them leading Quakers, were exiled to Virginia for eight months on suspicion of spying for the British and being otherwise “notoriously disaffected” (138). Godbeer notes that Friends suffered in other ways, including losing thousands of pounds of property in fines for not paying war levies. But he could have pressed the question further—why the vitriol? Quakers were a minority in Revolutionary America, and, as Godbeer notes, some of them did choose to fight—and they faced expulsion from their monthly meetings for doing so. Yet General Philip Schuyler called Friends “wolves in sheep's clothing” (137), and General Sullivan deemed them “the most dangerous enemies America knows” (139). It is worth pausing on the hyperbolic reaction. There was something about pacifists that got under the patriots’ skin that went beyond their worries about Friends passing on information to British lines. This could have been explored further.

Godbeer also highlights other ways Revolutionary Americans, particularly Quakers, understood peace that went beyond issues related to warfare and killing, what peace studies scholars call “positive peace” or I would call “right ordering”—that is, notions of ordering that proponents believed would create the best of all possible worlds, even if it took violent means to achieve it or even if it led to unintended violent outcomes. After the war, Henry got into the maple syrup business, which nearly ruined him, but it was driven by his vision of filling the backcountry with Quakers and other “respectable citizens” who would “build orderly farming communities and treat local Indian nations with respect” (215). Godbeer correctly ties this venture to antislavery—the maple syrup was intended to replace slave-produced Caribbean sugar. But this was also a profoundly complicated articulation of peace as well, one that contained within it the seeds of something more violent—the Federalist and Jeffersonian campaigns for Indian “civilization” and, later, Indian removal. Not coincidentally, even these violent programs were couched in the language of peace.

Overall, this is a worthy book for readers interested in learning more about the everyday trauma of life in Revolutionary America. It has an obvious appeal for those interested in Quaker studies, but it deserves a wider reading. As a work of biography, it is exemplary and a repudiation of an older notion that historians should avoid this genre in favor of more traditional narrative forms. Godbeer succeeds in bringing to life the humanity of his protagonists. We see them as they were: imperfect, suffering, living as we do within a set of contradictions, and shaped by the context of their time.