NB: I wrote this last week for a class, but the book is recently published and available, so I thought I’d post it to the site. Slavery and abolitionism are not my specialties, so this piece is largely descriptive; please don’t look to the text below for an understanding of where Drescher’s book fits within the historiography of slavery and abolitionism.

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge), a sweeping comparative history of slavery and its eradication, is the fruit of Seymour Drescher’s fifty years of scholarship on the topic. As the title indicates, Drescher is particularly interested in abolition, and he therefore examines historical developments based on their effect, whether positive or negative, on the institution of slavery. His analyses of local events focus primarily upon Britain, France, the Iberian peninsula, and their New World colonial outposts; less attention is devoted to slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Drescher’s book is arranged in three broad narratives: one concerning the “extension” (or rise) of slavery; one focused upon slavery in “crisis”; and one charting the “contraction” of slavery. A shorter fourth section discusses the unexpected “reversion” to slavery during the second quarter of the twentieth century (which took place in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet Union and Germany).

At the outset of his book, Drescher describes slavery as a “perennial institution” and outlines the ways in which Christians and Muslims enslaved each other (but not their co-religionists); describes the organization of African society and its ability to facilitate of the export of slaves after initial Portuguese contact; and the shift from Mediterranean to transatlantic slaving. He suggests that a “freedom principle” arose in the consciousness of serfs and peasants in northwest Europe during the fifteenth century, leading to the gradual incorporation of contracts for labor and the recognition that a line divided those who possessed a modicum of freedom from the far greater number of people who did not.

What, then, inaugurated abolitionist movements? Drescher suggests that increasing New World agitation on behalf of national independence and individual emancipation during the American Revolution, the messy Franco-American revolutions of the 1780s to the 1820s, and the Latin American revolutions of the 1810s and 1820s created a situation in which European citizens could no longer ignore the contradiction between “free soil” policies at home and the use of slave labor at the edges of empire. Drescher believes that this contradiction was felt most acutely in Britain, and that the nascent abolitionist movement there capitalized upon a rising tide of moral indignation among the general public. Through an expanded print sphere, increasing associational activity, and the process of mass petitioning, British abolitionists led three waves of protest (1787-88, 1791-92, 1806-07) whose cumulative force resulted in the abolishing of the slave trade by Britain’s government. Indeed, the fact that Anglo-American societies possessed “the most highly developed public sphere on the face of the earth” during the Age of Revolutions was “the most distinctive, durable, and consequential development in the demise of New World slavery.” By virtue of Britain’s global naval dominance during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was able then to “internationalize” abolition through a patchwork of bilateral treaties with powers in Old World and colonies and emerging nations in the New World.

Two more popular pushes in Britain, which Drescher describes with obvious relish, led to the emancipation of all of the empire’s enslaved peoples in 1833. He is careful to note, however, that the later efforts to transition from slavery to free labor do not follow the immediatist policies of Britain and France (which abolished slavery—for the first time—during its own revolution, in 1794). Instead, the tenacity of slaveholders, their fears of slave rebellions, and the inability of abolitionists to prove free labor more efficient than slave labor, as well as the fact that attacks on slavery seem always to arrive at the height of the institution’s economic power, conspired to create a situation in which gradual emancipation predominated. (One striking thread running through Drescher’s book is the fact that slave rebellions in the Americas often worked against the interests of slaves back in the halls of power at the seat of empire.)

The public sphere, though preeminent in Drescher’s account, is only one lens through which he views abolitionism during the nineteenth century. In each region on which he focuses, Drescher not only examines the impact of newspapers and public outcry, but also women, the church, the working and middle classes, and slaves themselves. Drescher’s comparative perspective allows readers to understand more fully which of these factors were real agents of change in which region; for example, whereas in the inaugural push for abolition in Britain depended to a large extent on the efforts of women and the church, they played a much smaller role in the initial efforts toward abolition in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil. Few previous considerations of abolitionism have ranged as widely as does Drescher’s; even a recent collection edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, Prophets of Protest, limits itself largely to the United States. Drescher’s synthesis of a broad range of materials and his comparative perspective offer readers an opportunity to consider anew the history of slavery and abolition in our country.