“Jim Powell's 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 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 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

“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 of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations