Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (review)

For the last thirty years, Drescher has made groundbreaking contributions to the economic, social-political, and comparative history of modern slavery and anti-slavery in domestic and external territories of Britain, France, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Nazi Germany. His new and magisterial work both builds on this previous scholarship and expands it (based on extensive reading in the secondary literature) to the broader premodern world, as well as the modern United States, Spanish America, India, the Islamic Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Soviet Union.

Unlike Drescher’s previous writings, this book is not organized around a set of analytical arguments but rather traces the rise, abolition, recovery, and virtual disappearance of slavery over several centuries (mainly from 1700 to 1990) in a number of locales (focusing on the Atlantic New World). This narrative represents an argument about the relationship between slavery and capitalist development (consistent with Drescher’s major monographs) and is punctuated by other specific contentions with other scholars. Although the general account is masterful and persuasive, there are some problems with both the causal explanation of abolitionism and the care devoted by both author and publisher to presenting this rich material.

The narrative and (understated) central argument center on stages of tension between the liberal nature of northwestern European society (mainly Britain and the colonial/postcolonial United States plus France and the Netherlands) and its involvement in large-scale plantation slavery. In stage one, c. 1500, slavery was a normal aspect of life everywhere else in the world (including the rest of Europe). During the rise of their own plantation economies, these cradles of both liberty and capitalism maintained a distance between their domestic and overseas social orders. Eventually, certain social groups began to attack slavery. During the “Age of Revolutions” (c. 1770–1815), Britain abolished its slave trade and imposed similar restrictions upon other western nations. Simultaneously, the slaves of the richest New World plantation colony, St. Domingue, freed themselves and established the independent Republic of Haiti. Drescher notes (against much recent historiography) how both the continuing vitality of slave-based capitalism and the threats of violence and economic damage connected to revolutionary politics delayed the continuity of abolition during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Britain ended slavery throughout its Atlantic empire between 1834 and 1838, but the plantation economies of the southern United States, Brazil, and Cuba flourished. Only when abolitionist pressure brought about the American Civil War and the much slower death of slavery in Cuba and Brazil (1888 for the latter) did Atlantic slavery finally end. Even under British and French colonial rule or diplomatic pressure, slavery expired very slowly in India and tropical Africa, as well as in independent Islamic countries. The institution even enjoyed a brief but large-scale revival in the Stalinist ussr and Nazi Germany (Drescher stresses the role of Slavic conscripted labor rather than Jewish genocide targets).

Drescher states emphatically that if moral protest had not ended Atlantic slavery well before its “natural” demise in favor of ultimately more efficient free-labor systems, the history of twentieth-century struggles against totalitarianism might have been different. The ultimate weight of this argument must rest, however, not only upon a demonstration that capitalist logic did not dictate the timing of abolition but also upon an explanation of the forces that succeeded in bringing about what Drescher once famously labeled “econocide.” In this regard, Drescher offers only references to the tensions inherent in “the differential development of western Europe and the Western Hemisphere” and frequent evocations of “civil society” and representative political institutions as the context in which abolition could be pursued (18). Left out is any detailed concern with ideology (he even denies, against David Eltis, that ideology was the basis for not initially choosing Europeans over Africans as forced plantation labor) or religion, the modern transformations of which proved a major vehicle for anti-slavery efforts.

Drescher will also irritate some readers by giving...