Eric Williams
Chief Minister of Trinidad and Tobago | |
---|---|
In office 28 October 1956 – 9 July 1959 | |
Monarch | Elizabeth II |
Governor | Edward Beetham |
Opposition Leader | Bhadase Sagan Maraj |
Preceded by | Albert Gomes |
Succeeded by | Position abolished |
Political Leader of the People's National Movement | |
In office 1955–1981 | |
Preceded by | Party established |
Succeeded by | George Chambers |
Personal details | |
Born | Eric Eustace Williams 25 September 1911 Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago |
Died | 29 March 1981 Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago | (aged 69)
Political party | People's National Movement |
Other political affiliations | West Indies Federal Labour Party (1957–1962) |
Spouses |
St. Catherine's College, Oxford Queen's Royal College |
Nickname | The Father of the Nation[3][4][5][6][7] |
Eric Eustace Williams
Early life
Williams was born on 25 September in 1911. His father Thomas Henry Williams was a minor civil servant and devout
He won an island
Scholarly career
In Inward Hunger, Williams recounts that in the period following his graduation, 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". However, in 1936, thanks to a recommendation made by Sir
He completed the
Gad Heuman states:
- In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams argued that the declining economies of the British West Indies led to the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. More recent research has rejected this conclusion; it is now clear that the colonies of the British Caribbean profited considerably during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.[14]
However, Capitalism and Slavery covers the economic history of sugar and slavery beyond just the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and discusses the decline of sugar plantations from 1823 until the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s. It also discusses the British government's use of the equalisation of the sugar duties Acts in the 1840s to sever their responsibilities to buy sugar from the British West Indian colonies, and to buy sugar on the open market from Cuba and Brazil, where it was cheaper.[15] In support of the Williams thesis, David Ryden presented evidence to show that by the early nineteenth century there was an emerging crisis of profitability.[16]
Williams's argument about abolitionism went far beyond this decline thesis. What he argued was that the new economic and social interest created in the 18th century by the slave-based Atlantic economy generated new pro-free trade and anti-slavery political interests. These interacted with the rise of evangelical antislavery and with the self-emancipation of slave rebels, from the Haitian Revolution of 1792-1804 to the Jamaica Christmas Rebellion of 1831, to bring the end of Slavery in the 1830s.[17]
In 1939, Williams joined the Political Science department at Howard University.[13] In 1943, Williams organized a conference about the "economic future of the Caribbean."[18] He argued that small islands of the West Indies would be vulnerable to domination by the former colonial powers in the event that these islands became independent states; Williams advocated for a West Indian Federation as a solution to post-colonial dependence.[18]
Shift to public life
In 1944, Williams was appointed to the
Entry into nationalist politics in Trinidad and Tobago
From that public platform, Williams on 15 January 1956 inaugurated his own political party, the People's National Movement (PNM), which would take Trinidad and Tobago into independence in 1962, and dominate its post-colonial politics. Until this time his lectures had been carried out under the auspices of the Political Movement, a branch of the Teachers Education and Cultural Association, a group that had been founded in the 1940s as an alternative to the official teachers' union. The PNM's first document was its constitution. Unlike the other political parties of the time, the PNM was a highly organized, hierarchical body. Its second document was The People's Charter, in which the party strove to separate itself from the transitory political assemblages which had thus far been the norm in Trinidadian politics.
In elections held eight months later, on 24 September the Peoples National Movement won 13 of the 24 elected seats in the
Federation and independence
After the
The DLP victory in the
In 1961 the PNM had introduced the Representation of the People Bill. This Bill was designed to modernise the electoral system by instituting permanent registration of voters, identification cards,
The
Black Power
Between 1968 and 1970 the
On 3 April 1970, a protester was killed by the police. This was followed on 13 April by the resignation of
Williams made three additional speeches in which he sought to identify himself with the aims of the Black Power movement. He reshuffled his cabinet and removed three ministers (including two
Death
Prime Minister Eric Eustace Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, died on 29 March 1981 due to throat cancer at his official house in St. Anne, a Port of Spain neighborhood in Trinidad and Tobago. He was 69 years old at the time of his death.[20][21]
Personal life
Eric Williams had married Elsie Ribeiro, a music studies student born to a mother from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and a Portuguese Trinidadian father, on 30 January 1937, while he was a postgraduate student at Oxford University. He had known Ribeiro from Trinidad before he left for the United Kingdom. The ceremony was private out of fear that the terms of his scholarship could have prohibited marriage and he did not want it to be terminated. After he graduated, they moved to Washington, D.C. in the United States where he obtained a position at Howard University. They had a son, Alistair Williams, in 1943 and a daughter, Elsie Pamela Williams, in 1947. However, Williams questioned the paternity of Elsie Pamela, thus leading to problems in the marriage. In May 1948, Williams left Washington, D.C. to go back to Trinidad, abandoning his wife and children. His reason for not financially supporting them after leaving was because Ribeiro refused to send their children to Oxford University in the future.[1][2]
After returning to Trinidad in 1948, he met Evelyn Siulan Soy Moyou, a typist 13 years his junior of
Ribeiro responded with an injunction restraining him from proceeding with his petition. After dropping the proceedings, in a letter of April 1950 submitted to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia court, he agreed to abide by its decision and be bound by an order regarding alimony. However, a few months later while on a research holiday in the United States he reinitiated divorce proceedings in Reno, Nevada, known for its quick divorces, due to the fact that Moyou was pregnant with his child. However, Ribeiro obtained an injunction preventing Williams from making any attempt at divorce, on the grounds that he had earlier subjected himself to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia court. Williams filed formal proceedings for a divorce on 24 November 1950. On 13 December 1950, Williams was ordered to appear in court, most likely because he had filed for a divorce in Reno, even though he had earlier submitted himself to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia. Even though a lawyer had been assigned to him, he did not appear and on 22 December 1950 he was ordered to be taken into custody by a US Marshal. His lawyer in Reno pointed out that his divorce had been granted, though a search of the court records showed no entry for a final decree. Williams eventually met the six-week residential requirement to obtain a Nevada divorce and on 2 January 1951, he married Moyou in Reno, in a ceremony performed by The Rev. Munroe Warner of First Christian Church. Their daughter, Erica Williams, was born on 12 February 1951, in Reno. After his second marriage, Ribeiro obtained a divorce from him on 20 January 1951, on grounds of desertion. It was made effective on 21 July 1951 and he was ordered to pay a monthly alimony of US$250 for the maintenance of his first wife and two children. On 26 May 1953, Mayou died from Tuberculosis.[1][2]
Legacy
Academic contributions
Williams specialised in the study of slavery. Many Western academics focused on his chapter on the abolition of the slave trade, but that is just a small part of his work. In his 1944 book, Capitalism and Slavery, Williams argued that the British government's passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 was motivated primarily by economic concerns rather than by humanitarian ones. Williams also argued that by extension, so was the emancipation of the slaves and the blockade of Africa, and that as industrial capitalism and wage labour began to expand, eliminating the competition from wage-free slavery became economically advantageous.
Williams' impact on that field of study has proved of lasting significance. As Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman put it in the preface to a compilation of essays on Williams that was based on a commemorative symposium held in Italy in 1984, Williams "defined the study of Caribbean history, and its writing affected the course of Caribbean history.... Scholars may disagree on his ideas, but they remain the starting point of discussion.... Any conference on British capitalism and Caribbean slavery is a conference on Eric Williams."
In an open letter to Solow, Yale Professor of History David Brion Davis refers to Williams' thesis of the declining economic viability of slave labor as "undermined by a vast mountain of empirical evidence and has been repudiated by the world’s leading authorities on New World slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and the British abolition movement".[22] A major work which was written to refute Eric Williams' thesis was Seymour Drescher's Econocide, which argued that when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, Britain's sugar economy was thriving. However, other historians have noted that Drescher ended his study of the economic history of the British West Indies in 1822, and did not address the decline of the British sugar industry (something which was highlighted by Williams) which began in the mid-1820s, and continued until the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.[23] The majority of Eric William's thesis, which addressed the decline of the sugar industry in the 1820s, the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, and the sugar equalisation acts of the 1840s, has continued to influence the historiography of the 19th-century West Indies and it's connection to the wider Atlantic world as a whole.[24][25]
In addition to Capitalism and Slavery, Williams produced a number of other scholarly works focused on the Caribbean. Of particular significance are two published long after he had abandoned his academic career for public life: British Historians and the West Indies and From Columbus to Castro. The former, based on research done in the 1940s and initially presented at a symposium at Clark Atlanta University, sought to challenge established British historiography on the West Indies. Williams was particularly scathing in his criticism of the work of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. The latter work is a general history of the Caribbean from the 15th to the mid-20th centuries. The work appeared at the same time as a similarly titled book (De Cristóbal Colón a Fidel Castro) by another Caribbean scholar-statesman, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic.
Williams sent one of 73
The Eric Williams Memorial Collection
The
The Collection consists of the late Dr. Williams' Library and Archives. Available for consultation by researchers, the Collection amply reflects its owner’s eclectic interests, comprising some 7,000 volumes, as well as correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, historical writings, research notes, conference documents and a miscellany of reports. The Museum contains a wealth of emotive memorabilia of the period and copies of the seven translations of Williams' major work, Capitalism and Slavery (into Russian, Chinese and Japanese [1968, 2004] among them, and a Korean translation was released in 2006). Photographs depicting various aspects of his life and contribution to the development of Trinidad and Tobago complete this extraordinarily rich archive, as does a three-dimensional re-creation of Williams' study.
Dr Colin Palmer, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, has said: "as a model for similar archival collections in the Caribbean...I remain very impressed by its breadth.... [It] is a national treasure." Palmer's biography of Williams up to 1970, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), is dedicated to the Collection.
Film
In 2011, to mark the centenary of Williams' birth, Mariel Brown directed the documentary film Inward Hunger: the Story of Eric Williams, scripted by Alake Pilgrim.[27]
Selected bibliography
- Capitalism and Slavery, 1944.
- Documents of West Indian History: 1492–1655 from the Spanish discovery to the British conquest of Jamaica, Volume 1, 1963.
- History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 1964.
- British Historians and the West Indies, 1964.
- The Negro In The Caribbean, 1970.
- Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister, 1971.
- From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969, 1971.
- Forged from the Love of Liberty: Selected Speeches of Dr. Eric Williams, 1981.
Notes
- ^ a b c d "The private Eric Williams". 2 September 2001. Archived from the original on 2 November 2022. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
- ^ a b c d "TriniView.com - Love Hurts". www.triniview.com. Archived from the original on 17 May 2021. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
- ^ a b McLeod, Sheri-Kae (31 August 2020). "#Independence: Trinidad and Tobago Prime Ministers Since 1962". Caribbean News. Archived from the original on 19 October 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
- ^ a b "Trinidad & Tobago 50plus Of Canada". Trinidad & Tobago 50plus Of Canada. Archived from the original on 12 August 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
- ^ a b "Trinidad chosen by Chinese President for first regional visit | Trinidad and Tobago Government News". www.news.gov.tt. Archived from the original on 7 April 2022. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
- ^ a b Loubon, Michelle. "De Fosto sings tribute to Mother Trinbago". www.guardian.co.tt. Archived from the original on 6 March 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
- ^ a b Wilson, Sacha. "??Jack: Williams burnt 'constitution' in 1960". www.guardian.co.tt. Archived from the original on 6 March 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2021.
- ^ "C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and the End of Slavery in the Caribbean". jacobinmag.com. Archived from the original on 6 December 2022. Retrieved 21 February 2022.
- from the original on 3 June 2023. Retrieved 21 February 2022.
- ^ The Leathersellers' Company Court Minutes, 1 July 1936, ref. GOV/1/25, pp. 136–37.
- S2CID 150904617.
- ISBN 978-1-4742-6534-8.
- ^ S2CID 242525007.
- ^ Gad Heuman, "The British West Indies" in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire – Vol. 3: The 19th Century (1999), 3:470.
- ^ Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964).
- ^ David Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- ^ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
- ^ from the original on 20 September 2022. Retrieved 25 April 2021.
- ^ "Former Ministers of Finance - Ministry of Finance, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago". 21 February 2014. Archived from the original on 21 February 2014.
- ^ "Dr Eric Eustace Williams (1911 - 1981)". The Presidency of Republic of South Africa. Archived from the original on 19 April 2023. Retrieved 2 March 2022.
- ^ Fraser, Gerald (31 March 1981). "ERIC WILLIAMS,LEADER OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, IS DEAD". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2 March 2022. Retrieved 2 March 2022.
- ^ Davis, David Brion; Barbara L.Solow (18 November 2017). "The British & the Slave Trade". Archived from the original on 28 September 2017. Retrieved 15 June 2017 – via www.nybooks.com.
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(help) - ^ Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
- ^ Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004), p. 103.
- JSTOR 568291
- ^ "Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages" (PDF). NASA. 13 July 1969. Archived (PDF) from the original on 3 September 2019. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
- ^ Raymond Ramcharitar, "Inward Hunger: The Movie" Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Guardian Media, 5 October 2011.
References
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (November 2009) |
- Eric Williams. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery Richmond, Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
- Eric Williams. 1964. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. Port of Spain. ISBN 1-881316-65-3
- Eric Williams. 1964. British Historians and the West Indies, Port of Spain.
- Solow, Barbara, and Stanley Engerman (eds). 1987. British Capitalism & Caribbean Slavery: the Legacy of Eric Williams.
- ISBN 0-87023-887-6
- Drescher, Seymour. 1977. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition
- Meighoo, Kirk. 2003. Politics in a Half Made Society: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925–2002. ISBN 1-55876-306-6
- Rahman, Tahir (2007). We Came in Peace for all Mankind- the Untold Story of the Apollo 11 Silicon Disc. Leathers Publishing. ISBN 978-1-58597-441-2.
External links
- Quotations related to Eric Williams at Wikiquote
- Eric Williams Memorial Collection Homepage
- Eric Eustace Williams in the Digital Library of the Caribbean
- "History Provides the Blueprint – Full Documentary"
- Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery, Richmond, Virginia: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
- Capitalism and Slavery revisited: the legacy of Eric Williams by Christian Høgsbjerg in International Socialism, 177 (2023).