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

[Wojtek S]

[WS:] My understanding is that the British abolished slavery for
strategic rather than economic reasons - to undercut the US economy
that benefited from it and also France that benefited from slave
trade.  Ditto for Zanzibar - they had different strategic plans for
East Africa, and Zanzibar slave traders stood in their way.

So the question is not whether it was an economic vs a moral choice,
but rather an economic vs a strategic choice.  The first one is a
no-brainer, ans it would be rather difficult to find an example of a
country that would deliberately ruin its economic well being for moral
reasons.  As to the latter - examples of sacrificing economic
interests for strategic gains  are plentiful and one does not need to
look very far - US policies provide many of them.

I also think that a far more interesting question would be under what
conditions decision/policy makers prefer to sacrifice their economic
interests for strategic considerations and vice versa.

Wojtek

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:02 AM, James Heartfield
<Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.)
>
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