Eric Williams

Eric Eustace Williams was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on the twenty-fifth of September 1911. He took an Island Scholarship to Oxford and a doctorate at Oxford in 1938. His dissertation, defended that year and substantially revised, was published in 1944 as Capitalism and Slavery — the historical analysis that connected the capital accumulated through Atlantic slavery to the financing of the British industrial revolution.

The Williams Thesis — that British abolition was not principally a moral movement but a strategic adjustment by capital that had outgrown the slave economy — was rejected by the British historical establishment for forty years. By the 1980s it had become the standard analytic framework for Atlantic economic history. The book remains continuously in print and is taught across history and economics curricula globally.

He returned to Trinidad in 1948 to teach at Howard University, founded the People's National Movement in 1956, and led Trinidad and Tobago to independence on the thirty-first of August 1962. He served as Prime Minister for the next nineteen years — through the founding of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in 1973, the petroleum-driven economic boom of the 1970s, and the negotiation of the U.S. base at Chaguaramas.

He was a professional historian who governed. The combination is rare; the standard of intellectual seriousness he brought to Caribbean statecraft shaped the political culture of the English-speaking Caribbean for the rest of the century.

He died in office in Port of Spain on the twenty-ninth of March 1981, age sixty-nine.

He is honored here as the historian-statesman who proved capitalism rose on the back of slavery, then governed.