The Mighty Experiment by Drescher
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Great Britain had amassed Europe's largest imperial stake in the transatlantic slave system. During the next three generations the British dismantled that stake in a graduated series of withdrawals. This process has been portrayed, on the one hand, as a rational disinvestment in a foundering overseas system by the world's greatest and most dynamic economic power. On the other hand, it has been assessed as the world's most expensive per capita overseas investment in modern history. In this latter perspective, British anti-slavery was the the crucial element in the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. For those who actually planned, debated, implemented, and adjusted to the process, ending British slavery was best conceived neither as a timely withdrawal from a failed economy nor an unprecedented national sacrifice. Properly done, it was to be a rational social experiment. Emancipation was designed to simultaneously minimize agitation on both sides of the Atlantic, and to maximize the scientifically proven superiority of free over slave labor. It would thereby not only benefit planters, consumers, and capitalists within the empire, but also accelerate the peaceful and voluntary surrender of millions of chattels throughout the world. The implementation and evaluation of emancipation turned out to be a far more contentious affair than the originators had anticipated. It absorbed minds of a whole generation of parliamentarians, governments, and journalists. The origin, execution, and public assessment of this great experiment, in its own contemporary terms, is the subject of this study.
""Seymour Drescher's magnificent book on the British Act of Emancipation of 1833, and many other things besides, explains the role of the eighteenth-century scince of political economy in the anti-slavery movement"-EH-NET
Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Econocide: British Slavery in the Age of Abolition (1977), Capitalism and Antislavery (OUP, 1987), and From Slavery to Freedom (1999) and the co-editor of Slavery (OUP, 2001).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780195176292 |
| ISBN 10 | 0195176294 |
| Title | The Mighty Experiment |
| Author | Drescher |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 2004-09-23 |
| Number of pages | 318 |
| Prizes | Winner of First Prize, 2003 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |