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Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. By Seymour Drescher. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. Pp. xiv + 279. $16.95

This is, I suppose, as thoroughgoing and elegant a piece of revisionism in the best sense as has appeared anywhere in the discipline in recent years. For generations historians have accepted the decline of the British West Indies after 1775 as a core element of the history of both the British Empire and British slavery and the abolition movement. Now Professor Seymour Drescher has taken advantage of his status as a newcomer to this field by examining and decisively rejecting this long-held belief. Econocide evaluates every conceivable aspect of the decline thesis and searches in vain for evidence that any part of the slave system was waning in the half century or so before 1815. In this period, the importance of the West Indies to Britain increased in both relative and absolute terms; the British slave trade reached peaks of both volume and profitability; British manufacturers drew more raw materials from, and supplied more goods to, the slave system than ever before; and as a result of British conquests, that system expanded to the point where it alone supplied Europe with tropical produce. Temporary exigencies of war, hurricanes, and credit squeezes did not disguise for contemporaries the uniformly bright economic prospects of the slave system whether viewed from the perspective of 1775, 1790, or 1806. As the title implies, the system was destroyed when flourishing and no group in British society except the slaves gained or could expect to gain in income terms. This conclusion, moreover, is unchanged even if abolition is viewed from the Eric Williams standpoint as a preliminary to an attack on the protectionist system: defenders of the slave system, Professor Drescher shows, invariably used free trade arguments as the core of their defense, while manufacturers, Williams's arch enemies of the protected West Indies, were far more likely to be asking for protection themselves at this period than pushing for free trade. Up to this point, the demolition job is entirely convincing though made somewhat easier by the author's persistent assumption that the slave system was the epitome of capitalism — capitalism after all can hardly be said to have turned against slavery as Williams agreed if one assumes slavery was capitalism carried to its logical conclusion. But when Drescher briefly addresses the obvious question of why the slave trade and slavery were actually abolished, his position is less secure. He moves straight from the argument that there were no ex ante direct beneficiaries from abolition to the proposition that abolition represented the triumph of non-commercial over commercial values spurred by a newly asserted mass public opinion. But since the publication of David Brion Davis' The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 there have been not one but two broad "economic" explanations of abolition, the latest version stressing the role of ideology and following the path laid down by Antonio Gramsci. While Drescher deals effectively with the economic determinists there is little here that is inconsistent with the