[lbo-talk] Seymour Drescher and the Decline of the West Indian planters

[James Heartfield]

Does anyone have a good answer to Seymour Drescher's 'Econocide' (1977)?
Drescher takes issue with Eric Williams' Marx-inspired argument that slavery 
was abolished in the British colonies because it was already in economic 
decline. Drescher, who thinks that abolition was a moral choice that cost 
the British Empire dearly in economic terms uses Schumpeter's estimates of 
UK economy to show that, on the contrary, the West Indian plantocracy was in 
rude health and expanding. (There is a recent book David Beck Ryden, West 
Indian Slavery and the British Abolition (2009), taht takes issue with 
Drescher, but I haven't read it yet.)