Seymour Drescher (born 1934) is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and slavery and his published work Econocide.
[2] He was the first to attract scholarly attention to Tocqueville's views of problems of poverty, colonial slavery, and race.
Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar Matthew Mancini, calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English..."[3] Drescher's more recent historical studies have been primarily in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world.
His book Econocide made a convincing counter-claim to Eric Williams' argument that abolition happened in part due to the economic decline of the British West Indies (BWI) after 1775.
Drescher instead states that the slavery-based system which underpinned the economy of the BWI continued to be profitable prior to 1815 and that abolition actually caused the decline rather than the other way around.