Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery
"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 Powell’sGreatest Emancipationsis 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 Powell’s 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 hasn’t been heard in a long time.” --  David Beito, author ofTaxpayers in RevoltandBlack Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power“I very much enjoyed readingGreatest 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 ofTime on the Cross, the Economics of American Negro Slavery, co-editor ofThe Historical Guide to World Slaveryand other books  Praise for Jim Powell: “Powell’s 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 ofThe Wealth and Poverty of Nations“Powell’s analysis is thoroughly documented, relying on an impressive variety of popular and academic literature both contemporary and historical.”--Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate