Seymour Drescher, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetSeymour Drescher
American historian
Date of Birth: 20-Feb-1934
Place of Birth: The Bronx, New York, United States
Profession: historian
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About Seymour Drescher
- Seymour Drescher is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery. Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959.
- He was born in 1934 in Bronx, New York.
- He initially focused his research on Tocqueville.
- He pioneered in attracting scholarly attention to Tocqueville's views of problems of poverty, colonial slavery, and race.
- He was the first scholar to investigate the central role of England in Tocqueville's political thought.
- Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar, Matthew Mancini, author of a comprehensive survey of Tocqueville and American intellectuals (2006), calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English...." Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world.
- One of his most dogged critics acknowledged the power of his argumentation (2002), comparing him in this respect to Adam Smith, author of the classic Wealth of Nations.
- According to Yale's David Brion Davis, Drescher is "the historian who [in Econocide, 1979] demolished the long-standing thesis that British abolitionists succeeded only because the slave colonies were in a state of irreversible decline." (2002) However, Drescher ends his study of the British Caribbean in 1822, and does not address the decline of the British sugar industry highlighted by Williams, which began in the mid-1820s, and continued until the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s.
- The majority of the Eric Williams thesis, which addresses the decline of the sugar industry in the 1820s, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, and the sugar equalisation acts of the 1840s, has not been refuted or undermined.
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