Short answers, pulled from the story.
Seymour Drescher is an American historian born in 1934 in the Bronx, New York, and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been publishing since 1959 and received the Frederick Douglass Prize in 2003. His research covers two major areas: the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville and the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world.
Drescher argues in Econocide, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1977, that Britain's abolition of the slave trade caused economic decline rather than responding to it. His research showed that the British West Indies economy remained profitable up to 1815, undermining the view that abolition was an economically rational response to decline. The title Econocide reflects his conclusion that Britain ended something still economically viable.
Eric Williams argued that economic decline in the British West Indies after 1775 helped drive abolition of the British slave trade. Drescher countered that the British West Indies economy remained profitable up to 1815, a forty-year gap that challenged Williams' premise. The debate between the two positions has continued among historians since Econocide appeared in 1977.
Drescher was the first historian to draw sustained scholarly attention to Alexis de Tocqueville's views on poverty, colonial slavery, and race. Tocqueville scholar Matthew Mancini has called Drescher 'arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English.' This early work predated his later focus on the economic history of Atlantic slavery and abolition.
In 2018, Seymour Drescher narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh. He has lived and worked in Pittsburgh since moving there with his wife Ruth Drescher in 1962.
Drescher's major works include Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), Capitalism and Antislavery (Oxford University Press, 1987), From Slavery to Freedom (New York University Press, 1999), The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009).