Blackwell Reference Online

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Eric Eustace Williams was prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 to 1981, and an anti-imperialist historian who outlined a divergent theory of social development based on economics and the dynamics of slavery, based particularly on racial exploitation and the accumulated concentration of capital giving rise to modern capitalism.Born in Trinidad, Williams' father worked for the post office. His mother's lineage was rooted in the Creole elite. He attended Queens Royal College in Port of Spain from 1931 onward, where he captained the football team and excelled academically. In 1932 he was awarded the Lone Island Scholarship which allowed him to attend Oxford, where he studied modern history and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in 1938. Williams extended his doctoral thesis from Oxford and published it as Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In this book he elucidated the relationship between Britain and the West Indies from an economic perspective, based on slavery. His framework of analysis has transcended its purely historical narrative to become indispensable to the development of a Caribbean identity. Williams expounds upon the basic premise that western capitalism (based on the British experience) was founded on the slave trade; hence, the British motivation for ending slavery was economically opportune and allowed the western industrialists to limit what would have been a ... log in or subscribe to read full text