Why Did the British Abolish the Slave Trade? Econocide Revisited

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Notes

It is also a book which has reached far beyond the relatively arcane area of history. The word itself – ‘econocide’ – has entered the everyday vernacular and is now widely used to discuss apparently irrational business deals and to describe suicides prompted by economic factors. It even surfaced in 2010 in Ireland to describe the Irish economic collapse. Whatever else he achieved, Seymour Drescher has left his mark on the way people discuss apparently irrational economic behaviour.

Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (London: Macmillan, 1975).

The work of Christopher Leslie Brown has, however, confirmed the necessity for a re-examination of evangelical action in anti-slavery. See Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

For a recent variant on the work of Eric Williams, see David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 211.

Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Notes on contributors

James Walvin

James A. Walvin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, England.