Abolition by Seymour Drescher

Author:Seymour Drescher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

5 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) 78, Table 17, “Shares of Sugar Exports to the North Atlantic, 1805–1806.” These figures do not include the exports of slave-grown produce imported from the United States, especially cotton, the bulk of which was shipped to Britain during the period of the French Wars. Joseph Inikori estimates that British America accounted for 31 percent of the total value of New World export production in 1761–1780. In the following two decades, the former British-American share rose to 50 percent. The Caribbean share of British-American exports rose steadily from 55 percent on the eve of the American Revolution (1768–72) to 60 percent on the eve of slave trade abolition (1804–1806) to 67 percent by the end of the Napoleonic wars (1814–1816). See Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202 (Table 4.8), 176 (Table 4.2); and Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), 112–117, Tables 58–60 (imports by area, 1784–1816). From the British imperial perspective, this period was characterized by sharp initial war-induced reduction in its slave system at the beginning of the period, followed by a remarkable war-induced resurgence between the late 1780s and the 1810s. S.H.H. Carrington argues that there was a continuous decline in the profitability and prosperity of the British slave system after 1775. See The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). David Rydan more recently argues that a short term decline before 1807 is an important component of the decision to abolish slavery. See West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For a recent assessment of the economic context of abolition, see David Richardson, “The Ending of the British Slave Trade in 1807: The Economic Context,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 127–140. The crisis theory of British abolition certainly does not exhaust the variety of broad interpretations of its rise and success. Of the most stimulating hypotheses were generated by Eric Williams Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and have both generated extensive debates. On the former see Eltis Economic Growth, ch. 1; and Seymour Drescher, “Capitalism and Slavery After Fifty Years,” Slavery and Abolition, 18 (3) (1997), 212–227. On the latter, see The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolition as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, Thomas Bender, ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). (See also note 19, below).

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