Synopses & Reviews
For thousands of years, slavery went unchallenged in principle. Then in a single century, slavery was abolished and more than seven million slaves were freed. Greatest Emancipation tells this amazing story, focusing on Haiti, the British Caribbean, the United States, Cuba and Brazil, which accounted for the vast majority of slaves in the west. Jim Powell offers some surprising insights and shows that while the abolition of slavery was essential to any free society, it wasnt the sole determing factor, since some societies that abolished slavery later embraced dictatorships. Jim Powell reveals the process and tremendous influence that slavery's eradication had on individual societies in the west.
Review
"Powell...has written a sweeping study of emancipation in the Atlantic world, detailing abolitionist movements and the end of slavery in Haiti, the British Caribbean, Cuba, Brazil, and the US. His argument is provocative...Powell's contribution to the debate is an important voice." -- CHOICE
“Jim Powells Greatest Emancipations is a thoughtful, well-written book with a provocative and challenging thesis. This book chronicles the people and their strategies that emancipated slaves in the Western Hemisphere. Powell develops a case that that the more violence was involved in an emancipation, the worse the outcomes tended to be. Among other things, the destruction and killing of war led to a backlash that nobody could control, a backlash that subverted civil rights for decades. Readers will be interested to see Powells reasons for believing that equal rights probably would have been achieved decades sooner if war - including the U.S. Civil War - had been avoided. He offers a refreshing abolitionist, antiwar case that hasnt been heard in a long time.” -- David Beito, author of Taxpayers in Revolt and Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power
“I very much enjoyed reading Greatest Emancipations. I thought it did an excellent job presenting the material and showing how some key issues were settled. Readers should learn a great deal that they had not previously known, and they should begin to see things in a different light.”-- Stanley Engerman, Bancroft Prize winning co-author of Time on the Cross, the Economics of American Negro Slavery, co-editor of The Historical Guide to World Slavery and other books Praise for Jim Powell: “Powells analysis is thoroughly documented, relying on an impressive variety of popular and academic literature both contemporary and historical.”--Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate“Jim Powell is one tough-minded historian, willing to let the chips fall where they may.”--David Landes, Harvard University and author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
“Powells analysis is thoroughly documented, relying on an impressive variety of popular and academic literature both contemporary and historical.”--Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate
About the Author
Jim Powell, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author The Triumph of Liberty, FDR's Folly, Wilson's War and Bully Boy. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Town & Country, Esquire and Americana, among other publications. He has lectured in Argentina, Brazil, Great Britain, Germany and Japan. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.