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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, 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, 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."
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