Eric Williams - Capitalism and Slavery

Colin A. Palmer

Few Modern Historical works have enjoyed the enduring intellectual impact and appeal of Eric Williamss Capitalism and Slavery. Its publication in 1944 was greeted by acclaim in some quarters and severe criticism in others. The scholarly debate over its conclusions continues fifty years later with no sign of abating. This classic work by a West Indian scholar remains the most provocative contribution to the study of the complex relationship between the African slave trade, slavery, the rise of British capitalism, and the emancipation of the slave population in the West Indies.

Eric Eustace Williams was born in Trinidad in 1911. An intellectually gifted young man, he attended Queens Royal College, one of the best secondary schools on the island. In 1931 he was awarded the lone Island Scholarship and in 1932 enrolled at Oxford University, where he read for a degree in modern history. At Oxford, as in Trinidad, Williams was exposed to intellectual currents that celebrated the imperial connection and gave little agency to the peoples of African descent in the colonies. Recalling his formative years in Trinidad, Williams noted, The intellectual equipment with which I was endowed by the Trinidad school system had two principal characteristics quantitatively it was rich; qualitatively it was British. Be British was the slogan not only of the Legislature but also of the school.

As he grew intellectually at Oxford, the young colonial came to question, and ultimately reject, an imperial-centered analysis of his peoples history. In his meetings with his tutor, R. Trevor Davies, for example, Williams reported that he consistently took an independent line.The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery, would be revised, expanded, and published five years later.

Williams accepted a teaching appointment at Howard University in 1939. There, he continued his research, elaborating on his dissertation and placing special emphasis on the relationship between slavery and the rise of British capitalism. Williams also established contact with Professors Lowell Ragatz of George Washington University and Frank Pitman of Pomona College. The two scholars were leading authorities on the pre-emancipation history of the British West Indies.

Acting upon the advice of Ragatz, Williams submitted his completed manuscript to the University of North Carolina Press on February 17, 1943. In his letter to William T. Couch, the director, the author wrote that he hoped the book lives up to the high standards of your Press as much as it would seem to fit in with the general run of works on Negro Slavery which the intellectual world has learned to associate with the University of North Carolina. He noted that the manuscript had been read by Pitman and Ragatz and that his research had been supported by two Rosenwald Fellowships that he received in 194041 and in 1942.

Williamss letter was accompanied by a one-page prospectus describing the book and its principal thesis. The book, he said, attempts to place in historical perspective the relation between early capitalism in Europe, as exemplified by Great Britain, and the Negro slave trade and Negro slavery in the West Indies. It shows how the commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century was built up on slavery and monopoly, while the Industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century destroyed slavery and monopoly. He stressed that the West Indian colonies are put in a general colonial framework and that British West Indian development is seen always in relation to the development of other Caribbean areas, e.g., Cuba and St. Domingue, as well as other sugar producing areas, Brazil and India. Williams emphasized that he saw the humanitarian movement not, as is customary, as something abstract, but as essentially a part of the age and the general economic struggle against slavery and monopoly.