Seymour Drescher is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh

University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...

 and Slavery

Slavery

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

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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 British abolitionists succeeded only because the slave colonies were in a state of irreversible decline." (2002)

Work of research

• Abolition - A History of Slavery and Antislavery, Cambridge University Press, New York 2009 ISBN 9780521600859 and ISBN 9780521841023
• The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation

Reviews

Drescher's most original contribution to the study of antislavery has been his attention to the role of petitions after the 1780s, 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)