| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Seymour Drescher. The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. vi, 307. $50.00.

Seymour Drescher has been one of the major participants in the rich international debate on British antislavery initiated over thirty years ago by the republication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1964). His position in the discussion has been guaranteed through his refutation of Williams's economically determinist "decline thesis" of West Indian slavery following the American Revolution and his connection of abolition and emancipation to the drive of an antislavery movement deploying techniques of popular mobilization, thus locating it on the leading edge of a more general democratizing tendency. Drescher's explanation offers a political rather than an economic imperative and sees more than a religious impulse at the root of abolitionist success. In developing these interpretations, Drescher has evidently been sceptical of prevailing historiographical views; the thrust of his writing has been to establish the weight of one set of arguments as against another. His books and articles have been courteously polemical as well as deeply researched. . . .

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