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Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Seymour Drescher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 471 pp. (Paper US$ 26.99)
In Abolition, Seymour Drescher argues powerfully for the importance of antislavery activism. Rejecting assertions of slave labor's inefficiency or its incompatibility with capitalist, industrialized economies, he insists that slavery died naturally virtually nowhere. It had to be killed by antislavery efforts. Abolition celebrates activism - ordinary people using moral suasion, association, the pen, the ballot, and their pocketbooks to undermine an institution they came to regard as evil. For readers familiar with Drescher's prior studies, this central claim will be familiar, but his scope here is broader. The view is global and spans five hundred years.
The book's first section lays a broad foundation, arguing that societies with slavery (or other severely coerced labor) were the norm in world history. From this context, Drescher draws insight on the foundations of African slavery in the Americas. He insists that Europeans were quite familiar with slavery before launching the transatlantic slave trade. With European sailors routinely enslaved by Barbary pirates and Slavic peoples falling prey to Ottoman slaveholders, "Europeans never felt more vulnerable to enslavement than when they were creating their novel variant of the institution in the New World" (p. 34). As a result, slavery was not clearly associated with any particular race in the minds of Europeans. It was simply a fate that befell unfortunate people in a harsh world; few questioned its legitimacy.
In Part Two, Abolition turns to crises for slavery spawned by the age of revolution. Chapters on the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions show slavery first facing challenges in northwestern European empires that deemed slavery incompatible with the motherland but acceptable for tropical colonies. Great Britain experienced this bifurcation after English courts refused to recognize slavery within Britain. France drew a similar line between "free" metropole and slave empire. The United States created a similar dynamic after its revolution, when some states turned away from slavery. Abolitionism emerged in the "free" pockets within such slaveholding polities, exerting pressure most effectively where thriving public spheres and representative politics encouraged public debate, especially in Britain and the United States.
Drescher demonstrates that despite such challenges, slavery weathered the storm...