It is not often that a monograph like this, full of graphs and tables, is reprinted. Sure, there are history books that live through several editions, but they usually deal with more popular topics in cultural and political history or are focused on important historical figures. A second edition of a book dealing with just one issue in the economic history of Great Britain is a rarity. It only can be explained by the fact that the first edition of Econocide, published in 1977, was a turning point in the heated debate about the economic viability of slavery, and about the motives for ending the slave trade and slavery. That slavery did not die a natural death had been established for the cotton sector in the US South, but Drescher was able to prove that almost half a century before the ending of slavery in the US, Britain had been the first nation to deliberately destroy a profitable sector of its economy (hence the title) by outlawing the slave trade. Econocide undermined the generally accepted view that towards the end of the eighteenth century, slavery in the Caribbean had outlived its economic usefulness. Instead, it showed that slavery received a new lease of life during that period, especially in the newly acquired parts of the British Caribbean as well as in Cuba and Brazil.

The opposite view, i.e. that slavery was in decline towards the end of the eighteenth century and that abolitionists had economic and not humanitarian motives for opposing slavery, was first put forward by Eric Williams, a young Trinidadian historian in his classic study Capitalism and Slavery (1944). This well-written book contains no less than three powerful theses regarding the decisive role of slavery in the Atlantic world. First, Williams argued that Europe was able to increase its wealth by siphoning off the riches of the Third World, and particularly by using slavery based on race. Plantation slavery and the Atlantic slave trade provided Britain with new wealth and that wealth was then instrumental in financing the first Industrial Revolution. After 1750, however, when that Revolution got under way, the slave trade cum slavery sector of the British economy declined in importance. Other sectors were becoming more profitable. The slave trade had been abolished for economic reasons and that also was true for the abolition of slavery. In sum, Capitalism and Slavery was a cold shower for all those who had thought that the ending of the slave trade and slavery constituted ‘one of the few golden pages in the history of mankind’ as one historian had put it at the time. Obviously, the reverse had been true. Britain and in its wake the rest of the West had grown rich by killing large sections of the native population of the New World and by exploiting large numbers of Africans.

Some of these ideas are put to the test in Econocide, and Drescher shows that few are able to stand up to historical scrutiny. By establishing the exact volume of the British slave trade and by calculating the maximum profit per traded slave, others had already shown that even in the years when the British slave trade had peaked, the profits from that trade had never contributed more than one half of a per cent to the British GNP. The most difficult job, however, was finding out whether plantation slavery in the West Indies had been in decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. Econocide is able to prove beyond doubt that slavery remained profitable during the turbulent decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in spite of the rise in slave prices on the African coast, the higher costs of imported food after the US had become independent, the various large-scale slave uprisings, abolitionist pressures, and the Napoleonic wars. All these events and factors did cause a rise in costs, but these increases were dwarfed by the dramatic rise in the productivity of slave labour.

Why then were the slave trade and slavery abolished when the economy does not provide the answer? In the final chapter, Drescher sketches how the free labour ideology gained wide support among the new middle classes in Great Britain. Free labour had made Britain rich and that provided the abolitionists with the idea that slavery should be ended everywhere as it harmed economic growth. At the time of the first edition of Econocide, however, this alternative explanation had not yet been fully developed, and the reader is well advised to consult the new introduction in which the subsequent work of the author on this issue is summarized.

Drescher has effectively demolished the decline thesis of Eric Williams. However, because of the dialectics of this thesis, he automatically strengthened the other part of the Williams’ thesis, suggesting that slavery and the slave trade had been important economic institutions in bringing about the Industrial Revolution. Subsequent studies might have proven this notion to be exaggerated. The profits from the slave sector were simply too small compared with the profits made in other sectors of the British economy at the time. Yet, this research also revealed that, during the eighteenth century, Britain's markets in the New World grew more rapidly than those elsewhere. Williams is not dead yet and in order to sort out this part of his thesis, we need another Seymour Drescher.