Eric Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Eustace Williams was born on the 25th of September 1911, in Trinidad, then a British colony. He died on the 29th of March 1981, the sitting Prime Minister of an independent republic. In the seven decades between those two dates, he transformed a colonial possession into a nation, wrote a book that rewrote how the world understood slavery and capitalism, and stood at a lectern in an open square in Port of Spain and declared it a university.

  That square would become the launchpad for a political movement. That book would still be the starting point of scholarly debate decades after his death. And Williams himself would become so identified with his country that he earned a title no living politician normally receives: Father of the Nation.

  How does a child of a minor civil servant, a boy who damaged his hearing playing football at school, become the defining figure of an entire country? And why does a historian's thesis about sugar prices in the 1820s still provoke fierce argument among scholars today?

• 2. Oxford and the Scholarship

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  In 1932, Williams won an island scholarship, the kind of award that changes a life. It took him from Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain to St. Catherine's Society at Oxford, later renamed St. Catherine's College. He was not simply a good student; in 1935 he received a first class honours degree and ranked first among history graduates that year. He also played football for the university.

  At Oxford, Williams encountered something alongside the intellectual life: what he described in his autobiography, Inward Hunger, as rampant racial discrimination. He also travelled to Germany after the Nazis seized power, an experience that pressed itself into his understanding of how race and political economy intersect.

  The money problems followed him even after graduation. In Inward Hunger, he writes that he was "severely handicapped in my research by my lack of money... I was turned down everywhere I tried... and could not ignore the racial factor involved". Relief came from an unexpected source: Sir Alfred Claud Hollis, who had served as Governor of Trinidad and Tobago from 1930 to 1936, made a recommendation that led the Leathersellers' Company to award Williams a fifty-pound grant in 1936 to continue his advanced research at Oxford.

  The doctorate he completed in 1938, under the supervision of Vincent Harlow, would become the most consequential thing he ever wrote. Its full title was The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery. When Williams approached Fredric Warburg to publish it, Warburg refused, saying that such a book "would be contrary to the British tradition". It was published six years later, in 1944, under the title Capitalism and Slavery.

• 3. Capitalism and Slavery

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  Capitalism and Slavery was, on its surface, an argument about why Britain ended the slave trade. Williams rejected the received wisdom that moral and humanitarian motives drove the abolitionists. In his reading, economics drove everything: the declining profitability of West Indian sugar plantations made slave labour an obstacle, not an asset, to the emerging industrial capitalism of the 19th century.

  Williams also argued that the new economic interests created by the slave-based Atlantic economy in the 18th century generated political pressure for free trade and against slavery. These forces worked alongside evangelical antislavery and the self-emancipation of enslaved people, from the Haitian Revolution of 1792-1804 to the Jamaica Christmas Rebellion of 1831, to end slavery in the 1830s.

  The argument went further still. He examined how the British government used the sugar duties acts of the 1840s to sever its obligations to buy sugar from West Indian colonies and instead buy more cheaply from Cuba and Brazil. This was, Williams argued, not altruism but accounting.

  The thesis drew on the influence of C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins was also completed in 1938 and offered its own economic and geostrategic reading of abolitionism. Excerpts of Williams' thesis had appeared in 1939 in The Keys, the journal of the League of Coloured Peoples, before the full book arrived.

  The scholarly reception has been contested ever since. Seymour Drescher wrote Econocide specifically to refute Williams, arguing that Britain's sugar economy was thriving when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. David Brion Davis, in an open letter to scholar Barbara Solow, called Williams' thesis about the declining economic viability of slave labour "undermined by a vast mountain of empirical evidence". Nigel Biggar found Williams' calculations flawed, concluding that profits from the slave trade were far less than Williams proposed.

  Yet other historians pointed out that Drescher ended his economic study in 1822, leaving untouched the decline of the British sugar industry that Williams emphasised from the mid-1820s onward. David Ryden presented evidence of an emerging crisis of profitability in the early 19th century that supported Williams' argument. Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman, writing in the preface to a commemorative symposium volume held in Italy in 1984, put the legacy plainly: Williams "defined the study of Caribbean history... Scholars may disagree on his ideas, but they remain the starting point of discussion."

• 4. The University of Woodford Square

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  In 1939, Williams joined the Political Science Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1944, he was appointed to the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, and by 1948 he was back in Trinidad as the Commission's deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council.

  Back home, he gave a series of educational lectures that drew wide audiences. But 1955 brought a rupture: after disagreements between Williams and the Commission, they did not renew his contract. His response was to walk into Woodford Square in Port of Spain, the enclosed park that stood directly in front of the Trinidad courts and legislature, and deliver a speech. He declared that he had decided to "put down his bucket" in the land of his birth.

  He renamed the square "The University of Woodford Square" and began giving public lectures on world history, Greek democracy and philosophy, the history of slavery, and the history of the Caribbean. People from every social class came to listen.

  On the 15th of January 1956, Williams used that same platform to inaugurate the People's National Movement, his political party. Until then, his lectures had been organised under the Teachers Education and Cultural Association, a group founded in the 1940s as an alternative to the official teachers' union. The PNM was built differently from the parties that had come before: it was highly organised and hierarchical. Its first official document was its own constitution. Its second was The People's Charter, designed to distinguish it from the temporary political assemblages that had dominated Trinidadian politics.

  Eight months after its founding, in elections held on the 24th of September 1956, the PNM won 13 of the 24 elected seats in the Legislative Council, defeating six of the sixteen incumbents who ran for re-election. Williams then persuaded the Secretary of State for the Colonies to allow him to name the five appointed members of the council, over the objection of the Governor, Sir Edward Betham Beetham. That gave him a clear majority, and he was elected Chief Minister.

• 5. Federation, Independence, Republic

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  Britain's post-war plan for its Caribbean colonies pointed toward federation, modelled on successful federal arrangements elsewhere. The Montego Bay conference of 1948 set the common goal: Dominion Status as a federation. By 1958, a West Indies Federation had emerged, with British Guiana and British Honduras opting out, leaving Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago as the dominant players.

  The federation divided Caribbean political parties into two federal camps. The PNM affiliated with the West Indies Federal Labour Party, led by Grantley Adams of Barbados and Norman Manley of Jamaica. Several opposition parties in Trinidad aligned with the Democratic Labour Party, led by Manley's cousin, Sir Alexander Bustamante.

  The DLP's victory in the 1958 Federal Elections, combined with the PNM's poor showing in the 1959 County Council Elections, soured Williams on the federation project. Lord Hailes, the Governor-General, overruled two PNM nominations to the Federal Senate. When Bustamante withdrew Jamaica from the federation, Trinidad and Tobago was left in a position Williams described in a single memorable line: "one from ten leaves nought." The federation required Trinidad and Tobago to provide 75% of the Federal budget while holding less than half the seats in the Federal government.

  On the 15th of January 1962, the PNM General Council adopted a resolution to withdraw from the federation. The British government subsequently dissolved it. Trinidad and Tobago became independent on the 31st of August 1962, twenty-five days after Jamaica, after Williams reached a deal with DLP leader Rudranath Capildeo that expanded minority rights and added Opposition senators. The 1961 elections had given the PNM 57% of the vote and 20 of the 30 seats; that two-thirds majority had allowed the PNM to draft the independence constitution without DLP input.

  Fourteen years after independence, on the 1st of August 1976, Trinidad and Tobago became a republic. Williams served as Prime Minister without interruption from 1962 until his death in 1981, and also served as Minister of Finance from 1957 to 1961 and again from 1966 to 1971.

• 6. Black Power and the State of Emergency

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  Between 1968 and 1970, the Black Power movement built significant strength in Trinidad and Tobago. Its leadership grew within the Guild of Undergraduates at the St. Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies. Geddes Granger led the National Joint Action Committee, which joined forces with trade unionists including George Weekes of the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union and Basdeo Panday, then a young trade-union lawyer.

  The Black Power Revolution broke into the open during the 1970 Carnival. Williams responded with a broadcast in which he declared, "I am for Black Power", and introduced a 5% levy to fund unemployment reduction. He established the first locally owned commercial bank. These measures did not stop the protests.

  Events accelerated quickly. On the 3rd of April 1970, a protester was killed by police. On the 13th of April, A. N. R. Robinson, Member of Parliament for Tobago East, resigned from the government. On the 18th of April, sugar workers went on strike. Williams proclaimed a State of Emergency on the 21st of April and arrested fifteen Black Power leaders.

  Two days after the State of Emergency, a portion of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force mutinied under Raffique Shah and Rex Lassalle, taking hostages at the army barracks at Teteron. The Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard contained the mutiny. The mutineers surrendered on the 25th of April.

  Williams subsequently delivered three additional speeches identifying himself with the aims of the Black Power movement. He reshuffled his cabinet, removing three ministers, including two white members, and three senators. He proposed a Public Order Bill that would have curtailed civil liberties; facing public opposition led by Robinson and his newly formed Action Committee of Democratic Citizens, Williams withdrew the bill. Attorney General Karl Hudson-Phillips offered to resign over the bill's failure; Williams refused.

• 7. Memory and Archive

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  Williams died on the 29th of March 1981, at his official house in St. Ann's, Port of Spain. He was 69 years old.

  In 1998, the Eric Williams Memorial Collection was inaugurated at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, with former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presiding. The following year, in 1999, UNESCO named it to its Memory of the World Register.

  The collection holds some 7,000 volumes from Williams' personal library alongside correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, historical writings, research notes, conference documents, and memorabilia. It includes copies of seven translations of Capitalism and Slavery, among them Russian, Chinese, and Japanese editions from 1968 and 2004, and a Korean translation released in 2006. A three-dimensional re-creation of Williams' own study is part of the museum.

  Colin Palmer, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, called it "a national treasure" and described it as a model for similar archival collections across the Caribbean. His biography of Williams, covering the years up to 1970 and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008, is dedicated to the collection.

  In 2011, to mark the centenary of Williams' birth, filmmaker Mariel Brown directed Inward Hunger: the Story of Eric Williams, a documentary scripted by Alake Pilgrim. The title borrowed the name of Williams' own autobiography, itself the record of how a child from colonial Trinidad reached Oxford, rewrote the history of slavery, and then returned home to build a country. Among the papers Williams left behind is a contribution to the Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages sent to NASA in 1969. His message still rests on the lunar surface.