Seymour Drescher | |
---|---|
Born | 1934 |
Occupation | Professor and Historian |
Employer | University of Pittsburgh |
Seymour Drescher (born 1934) is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and slavery and his published work Econocide.
Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959. [1] He initially focused his research on Tocqueville. [2] He was the first to attract scholarly attention to Tocqueville's views of problems of poverty, colonial slavery, and race. Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar Matthew Mancini, calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English..." [3]
Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. His book Econocide made a convincing counter-claim to Eric Williams' argument that abolition happened in part due to the economic decline of the British West Indies (BWI) after 1775. Drescher instead states that the slavery-based system which underpinned the economy of the BWI continued to be profitable prior to 1815 and that abolition actually caused the decline rather than the other way around. [4] [5] There has been much debate among historians regarding this topic. [6] [7]
Seymour Drescher was born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York to Polish Jewish parents. [1] Drescher moved to Pittsburgh in 1962 with his wife, Ruth Drescher. [10] In 2018, he narrowly avoided being a victim on the mass shooting on the Tree of Life Congregation. [11]
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people.
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.
Eric Eustace Williams was a Trinidad and Tobago politician who is regarded by some as the "Father of the Nation", having led the then British Colony of Trinidad and Tobago to majority rule on 28 October 1956, to independence on 31 August 1962, and republic status on 1 August 1976, leading an unbroken string of general elections victories with his political party, the People's National Movement, until his death in 1981. He was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and also a noted Caribbean historian, especially for his book entitled Capitalism and Slavery.
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, colloquially known as Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
De La Démocratie en Amérique is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville. Its title literally translates to On Democracy in America, but official English translations are usually simply entitled Democracy in America. In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years.
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. It was passed by Earl Grey's reforming administration and expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", Ceylon, and Saint Helena. The Act was repealed in 1998 as a part of wider rationalisation of English statute law; however, later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions.
Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
The abolition of slavery occurred at different times in different countries. It frequently occurred sequentially in more than one stage – for example, as abolition of the trade in slaves in a specific country, and then as abolition of slavery throughout empires. Each step was usually the result of a separate law or action. This timeline shows abolition laws or actions listed chronologically. It also covers the abolition of serfdom.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches history courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation and until the 11th century, when the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom, and all slaves were no longer recognised separately in English law or custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Sir Reginald Coupland was an English historian of the British Empire. Between 1920 and 1948, he held the Beit Professorship of Colonial History at the University of Oxford.
Peter Robert Kolchin is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987).
Brycchan Carey is a British academic and author with research interests in the environmental humanities and the cultural history of slavery and abolition. He was educated at Goldsmiths' College, University of London and Queen Mary, University of London, where he completed a doctorate on "The Rhetoric of Sensibility: Argument, Sentiment, and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth Century". He lectured at Kingston University from 2000 before taking up the role of Professor of English at Northumbria University in 2016.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Abolitionism in the United Kingdom was the movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to end the practice of slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the world, including ending the Atlantic slave trade. It was part of a wider abolitionism movement in Western Europe and the Americas.
Victor Ambroise Lanjuinais was a French politician. He was a deputy from 1838 to 1848, and minister of Agriculture and Commerce in the second cabinet of Odilon Barrot.
Capitalism and Slavery is the published version of the doctoral dissertation of Eric Williams, who was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. It advances a number of theses on the impact of economic factors on the decline of slavery, specifically the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies, from the second half of the 18th century. It also makes criticisms of the historiography of the British Empire of the period: in particular on the use of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 as a sort of moral pivot; but also directed against a historical school that saw the imperial constitutional history as a constant advance through legislation. It uses polemical asides for some personal attacks, notably on the Oxford historian Reginald Coupland. Seymour Drescher, a prominent critic among historians of some of the theses put forward in Capitalism and Slavery by Williams, wrote in 1987: "If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test."
The Law of 4 February 1794 was a decree of the French National Convention which abolished slavery in all French colonies.
Under heading '4.08 - Family Background', "They lived in close proximity to their extended families in the Bronx and both of his parents were of Polish Jewish background."
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