The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation

By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Great Britain had amassed Europe's largest imperial stake in the transatlantic slave system. During the next three generations the British dismantled that stake in a graduated series of withdrawals. This process has been portrayed, on the one hand, as a rational disinvestment in a foundering overseas system by the world's greatest and most dynamic economic power. On the other hand, it has been assessed as the world's most expensive per capita overseas investment in modern history. In this latter perspective, British anti-slavery was the the crucial element in the greatest humanitarian achievement of all time. For those who actually planned, debated, implemented, and adjusted to the process, ending British slavery was best conceived neither as a timely withdrawal from a failed economy nor an unprecedented national sacrifice. Properly done, it was to be a rational social experiment. Emancipation was designed to simultaneously minimize agitation on both sides of the Atlantic, and to maximize the scientifically proven superiority of free over slave labor. It would thereby not only benefit planters, consumers, and capitalists within the empire, but also accelerate the peaceful and voluntary surrender of millions of chattels throughout the world. The implementation and evaluation of emancipation turned out to be a far more contentious affair than the originators had anticipated. It absorbed minds of a whole generation of parliamentarians, governments, and journalists. The origin, execution, and public assessment of this great experiment, in its own contemporary terms, is the subject of this study.

About the Author :
Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Econocide: British Slavery in the Age of Abolition (1977), Capitalism and Antislavery (OUP, 1987), and From Slavery to Freedom (1999) and the co-editor of Slavery (OUP, 2001).

Review :
"Drescher should be commended for providing us with a study that future historians will mone for precious detail on the relationship between abolitionism and nineteenth-century social sciences, and one that affords us valuable insight into the mentality of British abolitionists."-- The Journal of Modern History Mighty Experiment can be seen as the culmination of decades of painstaking research and mature reflection on the complicated process that in the British empire forwarded the global project of human emancipation."--The Journal of Social History "Seymour Drescher's magnificent book on the British Act of Emancipation of 1833, and many other things besides, explains the role of the eighteenth-century scince of political economy in the anti-slavery movement."--EH-NET