William Penn after 300 years: Paradoxes and legacies of a boundary spanner

2018 marked the 300th anniversary of the death of William Penn, and offered an ideal opportunity to revisit the life and career of this paradoxical figure. I argue that, over the course of his long career, Penn accomplished all that he did not only through his considerable skills (political, oratorical, intellectual) but also because he spent that career at the intersection of an extraordinary number of social networks in early modern England, Europe and America. It was precisely his role as a boundary spanner - occupying a nodal point linking the Society of Friends, the broader Dissenting community, the English government and those engaged in the colonial and imperial project throughout the British Atlantic - that accounted for Penn's extraordinary range of relationships with so many of his contemporaries. His boundaryspanning efforts were not always successful, but his indefatigable energy propelled him into multiple arenas from his convincement in 1667 until the end of his public career 45 years later.