From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (review)

From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. By Seymour Drescher (New York, New York University Press, 1999) 454 pp. $45.00

This volume contains fourteen previously published essays by one of the leading scholars of slavery, with an intelligent and useful foreword by Stanley L. Engerman. This valuable collection attests to the range of Drescher's interests and abilities and to the energy and vigor of his arguments; it belongs on the shelf of everyone interested in Atlantic slavery.

The papers are grouped in three sections--one on the social mobilization of the antislavery campaigns, one on antislavery in a European context, and a miscellaneous section that features an essay comparing the slave trade with the Holocaust and another discussing the role of Jews in the slave trade. Four articles, scattered between the first and third sections, deal with the central theme of Drescher's oeuvre--that the social mobilization of a new mentalité (a revolution in values) doomed the institution of slavery despite its manifest economic advantages to Britain (15). Since it is not possible to comment on all these contributions in a brief review, I confine myself to this last group.

Much of this important work has been embodied in Drescher's detailed refutation of Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944). (Indeed, if Capitalism and Slavery had not been written, Drescher might have had to invent it.) Williams believed that plantation slavery in the British West Indies made a major contribution to English industrialization during the eighteenth century but that the institution of slavery and the commercial system in which it was embedded were a bar to economic development in the new industrial society and had to be extirpated by its leaders.

Drescher thinks Williams is wrong on both counts (365), finding scant evidence of abnormal profit in the slave trade. Even an upward-biased estimate of the value of the entire slave sector makes it too small a proportion of national income to matter. These contentions, however, ignore the obvious fact that absence of abnormal profits reflects not the insignificance of the slave sector but simply the presence of competitive markets, and that the estimated value of the sector's profits, though small in relation to national income, is immense in relation to total British investment at the time. In fact, it bears a larger proportion to national income than the profits of all United States corporations bear to national income in today's world. Drescher's arguments are insufficient to refute the case that slavery had been making Britain richer, more commercial, and more industrial since the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

It is hard to square Drescher's contention that slave economies did not matter to British economic development during the second half of the eighteenth century with the assertion that the English grievously harmed their economy (committed "econocide") after 1807 by dismantling a system that had not contributed much to its development in the first place.

The contention that capitalism was able to rise up and smite an already declining slavery and mercantilism beginning c. 1807 is insupportable. Since Williams wrote in 1944 without the benefit of modern economic analysis, statistical methods, or archival research, finding flaws in his work is like shooting fish in a barrel. A more useful exercise would be to try to clothe the argument in modern dress, to put a best foot forward, and see if Williams' intuition was correct even if his supporting arguments were not. Many scholars view him this way. Drescher cites two of them--Brogan (365) and Emmer (108). ¹

Drescher objects to such efforts, finding serious epistemological difficulties in analyzing the past with the help of concepts and data that were unavailable to contemporaries. Presumably he would rule out data about (say) population, productivity...