Eric Williams

Eric Eustace Williams was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and one of the most consequential historians of slavery. He won a scholarship from Queen's Royal College to Oxford, took a first in history, and completed a doctorate that became Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. Its argument was that the profits of the Atlantic slave trade helped finance the British industrial revolution, and that abolition came when slavery ceased to be economically useful rather than when Britain became morally enlightened. The book was ignored or dismissed by much of the British academy for decades and is now central to the field. He taught at Howard University in Washington, then returned home and founded the People's National Movement in 1956. He led the colony to internal self-government that year, to independence in 1962 and to republic status in 1976, winning every general election until his death. He was a formidable public educator, lecturing on history to crowds in Woodford Square, which he renamed the University of Woodford Square. His later years drew criticism for centralised control of the party, for the state of emergency during the Black Power protests of 1970, and for an economy that grew on oil revenue without diversifying. He also presided over the failure of the West Indies Federation, remarking that one from ten leaves nought when Jamaica withdrew. He died in office in 1981. Capitalism and Slavery was reissued in Britain in 2022 and became a bestseller nearly eighty years after it was written. He was also almost completely deaf in later life and conducted much of his public business through a hearing aid he was known to switch off.

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