Seymour Drescher

Seymour Drescher was born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York to Polish Jewish parents.[1]

Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959.[1] He initially focused his research on Tocqueville. He pioneered in attracting scholarly attention to Tocqueville's views of problems of poverty, colonial slavery, and race. Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar Matthew Mancini, calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English...."[2]

Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. David Brion Davis describes Drescher as "the historian who [in Econocide, 1979] demolished the long-standing thesis that British abolitionists succeeded only because the slave colonies were in a state of irreversible decline." (2002). However, Drescher ends his study of the British Caribbean in 1822, and does not address the decline of the British sugar industry highlighted by Eric Williams, which began in the mid-1820s, and continued until the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s. Some of Williams' thesis, which addresses the decline of the sugar industry in the 1820s, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, and the sugar equalisation acts of the 1840s, may remain valid, but debate among historians continues as to how much.[3]

George Sochan, historian from Bowie State University, stated that because of "Drescher's evidence in Econocide, certain inherent weaknesses within the text of Capitalism and Slavery, and insightful criticisms of Williams' research warrant the scrapping of the Williams thesis that economic self-interest explains British antislavery during 1788-1838." [4]

Regarding this debate, Selwyn H. H. Carrington responded to Descher's critique in support of Williams's views. In his book The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810,[5] Carrington produced statistical evidence to support those views, more than Williams himself did. Drescher filled out his own criticism of the Williams thesis in From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery and Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective.

• 2003 – Frederick Douglass Prize

• Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977
• Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective, New York, Oxford University Press, 1987
• From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and the Fall of Atlantic Slavery, New York, New York University Press, 1999
• The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002
• Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-521-60085-9 and ISBN 978-0-521-84102-3