Seymour Drescher
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Seymour Drescher is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery. His recent book, The Mighty Experiment, received the Frederick Douglass History Prize in 2003.
Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959. 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. He was the first scholar to investigate the central role of England in Tocqueville's political thought. Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar, Matthew Mancini, author of a comprehensive survey of Tocqueville and American intellectuals (2006), calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English...."
Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. One of his most dogged critics acknowledged the power of his argumentation (2002), comparing him in this respect to Adam Smith, author of the classic Wealth of Nations. According to Yale's David Brion Davis, Drescher is "the historian who [in Econocide, 1979] demolished the long-standing thesis that Briish abolitionists succeeded only because the slave colonies were in a state of irreversible decline." (2002)
"Drescher's most original contribution to the study of antislavery has been his attention to the role of petitions after the 1780's, petitions that served to rally working-class support for the antislavery movement. . . . Another important contribution made by Drescher to the study of abolition is his work in placing the British experience in comparative perspective, focusing on some different questions than do other scholars also making comparisons of slavery and antislavery. . . . In addition to his important work on British abolition. . . he has written on two new questions arising from the present stage of black-Jewish relations in the United States, the role of the Jews in the transatlantic slave trade, and the comparative barbarism of two great moral evils, the slave trade and the Holocaust. . . ." (Stanley L. Engerman, 1999).
