Eric Williams, the distinguished scholar, statesman and long-serving prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago would have been 100 years old this year. A number of conferences commemorating the date are being held in many places. St Catherine's, his old Oxford University college held a fittingly impressive affair that coincided with his birthday on September 25. At the same time Trinidad held a similar event. The following day the University of London staged an event. Cuban scholars will also hold a major commemorative event later in the year. The Oxford conference, with scholars from the UK, Trinidad & Tobago, the US, Puerto Rico, and Brazil devoted two full days to the life, temper, temperament, politics, and scholarly works of Eric Williams. As may be expected, several sessions returned to the economic debate over the controversial study, capitalism and slavery that first appeared in 1944.
Colin Palmer and Selwyn Ryan who have produced recent hefty biographies of Williams, discussed his developmental policies and his attempts at Caribbean integration. Other scholars examined his early association with George Padmore, CLR James and Arthur Lewis (later Sir Arthur) in the 1930s, his diverse reading, and unpublished manuscripts left in the prestigious Eric Williams memorial collection on the campus of the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. Williams had many interesting facets to his life. His significant role in the development of the modern Caribbean historiography rivals his political accomplishments. Before he was a leading politician, Williams was an outstanding scholar, finishing first in his history honours class at Oxford in 1935, and completing a doctoral dissertation in 1938 that still manages, after all these years, to generate considerable heat in intellectual circles.
In many ways Williams was a typical product of his time although he was more competent and successful than most of his contemporaries. In this regard he may be compared to Christopher Columbus who brought the Americas into the intellectual and political consciousness of Europe. Columbus possessed no unique navigational skills and had he not "discovered" the Caribbean in 1492 it is quite possible that some other explorer would have done so within a few years. But Columbus catalysed exploration in the way that Williams catalysed Caribbean historical scholarship. In the thesis of his major work, Capitalism and Slavery, Williams connected in a more direct and sophisticated way than previously the relationship between imperialism, slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism.
Despite the extensive controversy surrounding the thesis, no historian has been able to demolish the basic argument set forth by Williams in 1944. Williams did not couch his language narrowly in simple profit accrual and reinvestment but rather in a complex, catalytically inducing process in which the employment of slaves represented market capital with the additional capacity to produce more capital. Slaves were a marketable commodity that directly produced other marketable commodities in a system that stimulated forward and backward economic linkages. The sugar business, after all, ranks among the earliest proto-industrial and capitalist forms of factory production in the modern age.
Equally important, Williams demonstrated that in the absence of an international banking system, the slave complexes facilitated the transition from bullionism (or the use of gold and silver to estimate national and individual wealth) to mercantilism (the attempt to restrict imperial trade to national carriers within imperial borders) to free trade. Capitalism opened the marketplace for private participants to operate with a minimum of governmental controls and government regulations. Williams saw the imperial activities of Europeans as driven by the urge to promote capitalism via non-restricting market-driven mechanism-an idea that goes back to the eighteenth century and to Smith and the Abbe Raynal.
Yet an economic focus was not solely the focus of Williams' thinking. Rather it was the fundamental reorientation of European historical thought relating to the Caribbean. As BW Higman has pointed out, "Williams... set out to unsettle and destroy the pillars of the old colonial order, not the least of all in its intellectual aspect. For him history was a battleground on which imperialist politics struggles against nationalist politics."
Eric Williams had a deep conviction shared by many others of his generation that Caribbean peoples had a history no less worthy than that of peoples from other parts of the globe, especially from Europe. His writings gave dynamic agency to the people of the Caribbean in the same way as CLR James' Black Jacobins gave agency to the rebellious slaves in that unfortunate French colony in 1791. This agency on the part of the enslaved may also be found in most modern histories of the Caribbean beginning with Elsa Goveia's path breaking Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands.
Another aspect found in Williams' works is a conscious attempt to look at the Caribbean regionally rather than as isolated peripheral subdivisions of European activities and empires. This is especially evident in his From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. But Williams indicated this regional conception in his earlier short study, The Negro in the Caribbean, published in 1945. Even with COMECOM the attempt to view the region as an integrated whole remains today an uncommon concept. Finally, in his writings and his speeches Williams conveyed a strong conviction more commonly found among Caribbean artists and writers that the people of the region needed to understand their history better.
Only by understanding that history better could they control their affairs more efficaciously in the modern world. That conviction remains more hope than reality but it was a hope that remained as long as Eric Williams lived. Truly he was a rare individual not only of Trinidad & Tobago but also of the Caribbean and the entire world.