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Eric Eustace Williams was chief minister, premier, and prime minister respectively of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 to 1981. He was also one of the Anglophone Caribbean’s first professionally trained historians. Several outstanding self-trained historians preceded him. Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) of Saint Thomas, J. J. Thomas (1840-1889) of Trinidad, J. A. Rogers (c. 1883-1966) of Jamaica, Theophilus A. Marryshow (1887-1958) of Grenada, C. L. R. James (1901-1989) and George Padmore (1903-1959) of Trinidad, and Norman Eustace Cameron (1903-1983) of Guyana were among his precursors and contemporaries. Most of these men had no university training or had studied subjects other than history. When Eric Williams graduated first among the firsts at Oxford University in 1935 and went on to obtain his D.Phil. there in 1938, he ushered in a new era in Anglophone Caribbean historical scholarship.
He had a distinguished academic record from childhood and won an island scholarship, the ultimate achievement of high school excellence. This entitled him to a free university education, and he broke with tradition by choosing to read history, rather than the law or medicine favored by scholarship winners before and after him. C. Augustin Petioni, later a pioneer of Marcus Garvey’s (1887-1940) Universal Negro Improvement Association and a leader of the Caribbean independence movement in the United States, was a friend of his father. So was T. A. Marryshow, a pioneer journalist and the “father of West Indian federation.”
In 1939 he began teaching at Howard University, America’s most prestigious African American university at the time. Here he interacted with a cast of brilliant scholars, among them Alain Locke (1886-1954), Ralph Bunche (1886-1954), Rayford Logan (1897-1982), and E. Franklin Frazier (18941962).He distinguished himself even in this distinguished crowd. Two Rosenwald fellowships enabled him to pay research visits to the non-English speaking territories of the Greater Antilles. He won the Journal of Negro History’s prize for best article of 1940. His first book, The Negro in the Caribbean, appeared in 1942 in a series edited by Locke. His second, The Economic Future of the Caribbean, coedited with Frazier, was published in 1944. In 1944 his magnum opus, Capitalism and Slavery, was published by the University of North Carolina Press.
It demonstrated in exhaustive detail how the unprecedented profits generated by the slave trade in Africans provided the economic wherewithal for the Industrial Revolution in England. For the new industrial and technological age, slavery had become an outmoded form of production and a brake on development. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire as a result of these economic forces. The abolitionist “saints” of British historiography were not primarily responsible for abolitionism. Theirs was a secondary role, which, happily for them, happened to coincide with the economic necessity of the time. Capitalism and Slavery was hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters and as an unwarranted attack on cherished orthodoxy in others. The battle over this topic has never subsided.
In this capacity he crisscrossed the Caribbean and researched a huge swath of Caribbean economic and social life. This complemented his already deep knowledge of the area’s history. There was probably no one else who could rival his historical and contemporary knowledge of the area.
Various subsequent publishing proposals came to naught. His manuscript on Education in the British West Indies remained unpublished for years until he published it in Trinidad in 1950.Some were published under the auspices of his Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago. Some were published by the press of the Peoples National Movement (PNM), the political party that took him to political power in Trinidad in 1956.
He wrote history with a passion matched by few professional historians. For him history was a tool of the anticolonial struggle and a stepping stone to politics. His Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago brought history to the masses in the early 1950s. He spread the society’s work with the same energy that had characterized his efforts to promote Capitalism and Slavery. His Education in the British West Indies (1950) was a manifesto for a Caribbean university. His History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1962) was an independence gift to his nation written, in between his political duties, in one month.
The professional Anglophone historians who followed him were often ambivalent toward his historical activism. Elsa Gouveia, the doyenne of the first generation of indigenous historians at the University of the West Indies, vitriolically denounced his British Historians and the West Indies (1964) for substituting “new shibboleths for old.” He envisaged this work as an expose of the “prejudices of metropolitan historians.”
His last major work, From Columbus to Castro (1970), was a survey textbook for university students. He had worked on it for years. It was vintage Williams, with a lively dogmatic style and a heavy bias toward economic history. It reflected his strengths in the colonial period, but was less detailed on the twentieth century.
His many important works do not provide a complete picture of his historical activity. He published voluminously in academic and popular publications, and issued many of his political speeches as pamphlets. The Caribbean Historical Review, published under the auspices of his Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago, released four issues between 1950 and 1954.
Bibliography:
- Williams, Eric. 1942. The Negro in the Caribbean. Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education.
- Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rev. ed. 1994, with new introduction by Colin A. Palmer.
- Williams, Eric. 1950. Education in the British West Indies. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Guardian Commercial Printery.
- Williams, Eric, ed. 1952. Documents on British West Indian History, 1807-1833. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Trinidad Publishing.
- Williams, Eric, ed. 1954. The British West Indies at Westminster: Extracts from the Debates in Parliament. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Historical Society of Trinidad and Tobago.
- Williams, Eric. 1962. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. Port of Spain, Trinidad: PNM Publishing Company.
- Williams, Eric. 1963. Documents of West Indian History. Port of Spain, Trinidad: PNM Publishing Company.
- Williams, Eric. 1964. British Historians and the West Indies. Port of Spain, Trinidad: PNM Publishing Company.
- Williams, Eric. 1969. Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. London: Deutsch.
- Williams, Eric. 1970. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969. London: Deutsch.
- Frazier, E. Franklin, and Eric Williams, eds. 1944. The Economic Future of the Caribbean. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Reprinted 2004. Dover, MA: The Majority Press.
- Martin, Tony. 2003. Eric Williams and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission: Trinidad’s Future Nationalist Leader as Aspiring Imperial Bureaucrat. Journal of African American History 88 (3): 274–290.
- Palmer, Colin. 2006. Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- Solow, Barbara L., and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. 1987. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Sutton, Paul K., ed. 1981. Forged from the Love of Liberty: Selected Speeches of Dr. Eric Williams. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Longmans Caribbean.
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