Seymour Drescher (born 1934) is an American historian and a professor at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...

, known for his studies on

Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (; 29 July 180516 April 1859), colloquially known as Tocqueville (), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works ...

and

slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...

and his published work ''Econocide''.

Career

Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959. He initially focused his research on Tocqueville. He was the first to attract 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..." Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the

Atlantic world The Atlantic World comprises the interactions among the peoples and empires bordering the Atlantic Ocean rim from the beginning of the Age of Discovery to the early 19th century. Atlantic history is split between three different contexts: trans-A ...

. His book ''Econocide'' made a convincing counter-claim to Eric Williams' argument that abolition happened in part due to the economic decline of the

British West Indies The British West Indies (BWI) were colonized British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grena ...

(BWI) after 1775. Drescher instead states that the slavery-based system which underpinned the economy of the BWI continued to be profitable prior to 1815 and that abolition actually caused the decline rather than the other way around. There has been much debate among historians regarding this topic.

Awards

* 2003 –

Frederick Douglass Prize The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University Yale University is a Private unive ...

Selected works

* ''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 and

Life

Seymour Drescher was born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York to

Polish Jewish The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the lon ...

parents. Drescher moved to Pittsburgh in 1962 with his wife, Ruth Drescher. In 2018, he narrowly avoided being a victim on the mass shooting on the Tree of Life Congregation.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Drescher, Seymour 1934 births Living people 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American Jews American male non-fiction writers American people of Polish-Jewish descent University of Pittsburgh faculty