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

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

, known for his studies on

Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (29 July 180516 April 1859), was a French Aristocracy (class), aristocrat, diplomat, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works ''Democracy in America'' (appearing in t ...

and

slavery Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

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. 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 the territories in the West Indies under British Empire, British rule, including Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Antigua and Barb ...

(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. It is a $25,000 award for the most outst ...

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 Jews, Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long pe ...

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 21st-century American Jews American male non-fiction writers American people of Polish-Jewish descent University of Pittsburgh faculty