Pike, Joseph (1658–1729), quaker merchant and author, was born at Kilcrea, Co. Cork, the eldest son of Richard Pike and Elizabeth Jackson (1636–88). His mother was from London, where some of her relations had enjoyed civic office, while his father was from a landowning family at Newbury in Berkshire and had come to Ireland as a corporal of a troop of horse in the Cromwellian army in 1648 or earlier. At the end of the war Richard Pike (d. after 1688) received an allocation of land in lieu of arrears of pay and remained in the army until, in 1655, he and his wife were ‘convinced’ of the truth of the Society of Friends; no longer able in conscience to use arms, he left the army. His father also lost the custodiam of lands at Sarsfield Court in Co. Cork which had been procured for him through the favour, now withdrawn, of influential friends and in 1664 both parents moved to Cork city where they opened a shop. Here his father suffered in the persecutions of quakers and after a period of imprisonment died of an infection contracted in jail, leaving three sons and two daughters. His dignified and religious death appears to have made a powerful impression on Joseph who was an earnest child.
Despite early piety Joseph struggled during adolescence to master a tendency to keep ill company, but before he was twenty years of age he had grown into a high-minded and industrious character. He went into business early, applying himself at first to wool-buying; soon he opened a linen draper's shop in Cork with his brother Richard (1664–1738). His principal business partners included Henry Wheddon, who married his sister Elizabeth (1656–93), and Samuel Randall (d. 1718), who in 1683 married a first cousin of his wife. Business took him regularly to England and the Low Countries, and he used the opportunity to maintain contact with other quaker communities. In 1681 he and Randall were in Bristol during a period of persecution of local quakers, and a display of solidarity by the two Cork merchants caused them to be imprisoned. On another occasion he accompanied his friend William Penn (qv) to Holland and attended a Friends’ meeting at Amsterdam.
By his own account, his ambition in business was moderate and he resisted opportunities for excessive enrichment lest they distract him from leading a religious life. He was concerned by signs of a decline from the purity of the early Friends, and growing materialism and secularisation. Though he never undertook the ministry, he attended the Friends’ half-yearly meetings in Dublin for twenty years and often the yearly meeting in London and published several works on doctrinal matters.
He became a freeman of Cork in 1685 and, unlike many from the protestant community, did not leave the city as war approached at the end of the decade. When overland travel appeared hazardous, he made a sea voyage to Dublin to attend a meeting there. He was in Cork during the siege by Jacobite forces.
In 1698 William Penn (whose connection with the family dated at least from his Irish tour in 1669–70, when he had stayed with Joseph's widowed mother) demised more than 10,000 acres in Pennsylvania to him; these lands, called the Pikeland township, passed later to his widow Elizabeth, then to their eldest son Richard (1686–1763) and finally to their kinsman Samuel Hoare (qv).
He married in 1682 Elizabeth (1662–1733), daughter of Francis Rogers and Elizabeth Erbury. Of the fourteen children she bore, three sons and four daughters survived. Her sister Rachel Rogers married in 1692 Joseph Hoare (qv), one of the sons of Major Edward Hoare (qv), and Joseph Pike became involved in the Hoares’ banking activities. Though the Pike name was later associated with banking in Cork from about 1770 until 1826, it does not appear to have been carried on by Joseph's direct descendants. His son Richard is said to have moved to London and it was his brothers Ebenezer (1662–1724) and Richard, and their offspring, who kept the name prominent in the city's commercial life until the end of the nineteenth century.
In old age he wrote an account of his life, which was published more than a century after his death; it includes his vivid recollections of the siege of Cork. A bibliography of his works is provided by Smith.