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ERIC EUSTACE WILLIAMS: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS
September 25, 1911- September 25, 2011
ERIC EUSTACE WILLIAMS IS A MAKER OF THE MODERN
CARIBBEAN.
This claim-an easy one to make- rests on two big planks:
Williams’s Caribbeanist politics and his historical
scholarship.
Williams’s Caribbeanist politics emerges in the early
1940s and sends up a bright flame in 1943, when the then
32-yer-old professor - Howard University-hosted ( in
Washington,D.C.) a conference on the economic future of
the Caribbean. Williams – the godson of TA Marryshow (
1887-1958), the” Grenadian Father of West Indian
Federation”-went on to play a leading role in the
creation of the historic West Indies Federation which,
sadly, survived just four years: Williams was around to
play a key role in the making of CARICOM.
Eric Williams’s historical scholarship is legendary: It
erupts in his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis (
“The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian
Slave Trade and Slavery” )in which the young scholar
pioneered a new historiography of slavery.
Williams rested his thesis on four heads:
(1) slavery was purely an economic phenomenon; racism
was not its cause, but a consequence;
2) the West Indian sugar economies funded Britain’s
Industrial Revolution;
3) the West Indian sugar economies suffered significant
profitability in the wake of the American War of
Independence; and
4) the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery
itself were driven more by economic considerations, than
by the philanthropy of William Wilberforce, Clarkson and
other “Saints”.
The ideas were all very controversial, especially as
Williams might have relied too heavily on faulty data.
Even so, the “Williams Thesis” survives and, indeed, it
still exercises the minds of the leading students of the
slavery trade and slavery abolition in the West Indies.
And what explains the longevity of the Williams Thesis?
Its intellectual audacity.
C. Taylor
September 25th 2011 |
