Books by Seymour Drescher

In this classic analysis and refutation of Eric Williams's 1944 thesis, Seymour Drescher argues that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for Great Britain but instead from the British public's mobilization against the slave trade, which forced London to commit what Drescher terms "econocide".

The great novelty of this process therefore lay in the fact that for the first time in history the nonslave masses, including working men and women, played a direct and decisive role in bringing chattel slavery to an end.