In an open letter to Solow, Yale Professor of History David Brion Davis refers to Williams' thesis of the declining economic viability of slave labor as "undermined by a vast mountain of empirical evidence and has been repudiated by the world’s leading authorities on New World slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and the British abolition movement." The main evidence provided to refute the Eric Williams thesis was in Seymour Drescher's "Econocide", which argued that when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, Britain's sugar economy was thriving. However, Drescher ends his study of the British Caribbean in 1822, and does not address the decline of the British sugar industry highlighted by Williams, which began in the mid-1820s, and continued until the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s. The majority of the Eric Williams thesis, which addresses the decline of the sugar industry in the 1820s, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, and the sugar equalisation acts of the 1840s, has not been refuted or undermined. Williams' arguments that the plantation system fuelled the Industrial Revolution are now established.