“Slavery was an economic institution of the first importance. It had been the basis of the Greek economy and had built up the Roman Empire. In modern times, it provided the sugar for the tea and the coffee cups of the Western world. It produced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism. It made the American South and the Caribbean islands. The reason was economic, not racial. It had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour.”
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
This is the third in a series on writers who shaped T&T.
Dr Eric Eustace Williams was born in Port-of-Spain on September 25, 1911, at the corner of Oxford and Dundonald Streets, the eldest of twelve children of Thomas Henry Williams and Eliza Frances Boissière. His father worked in the Post Office. His mother came from the Boissière family, a French Creole family whose name carried older Port-of-Spain associations and little money by the time Williams was born.
Port-of-Spain was a colonial capital. Government House stood above the Savannah, home to Sir George Ruthven Le Hunte, the Governor appointed by London when Williams was born. The Red House, rebuilt after the Water Riots of 1903, held the Legislative Council. The Colonial Secretary’s office, the Treasury and the courts carried the Crown Colony government. The harbour brought ships, officials, newspapers and news from Britain, and sent back sugar, cocoa, oil, asphalt, reports, profits and ambitious young men trained in colonial schools. Queen’s Royal College stood at Queen’s Park West, with its clock tower, masters, prizes and Island Scholarship boys. The Port-of-Spain Gazette and later the Trinidad Guardian, founded in 1917, belonged to the newspaper world of Seepersad Naipaul, VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon and Williams himself. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Anglican and Catholic schools, the merchant houses on Marine Square and the clubs around the Savannah formed the town Williams was born into.
There was already a black and coloured professional class in the colony. Teachers, journalists, lawyers, doctors, civil servants and political reformers had emerged from it. JJ Thomas had written Froudacity (a direct rebuttal to the racist travelogues of British historian James Anthony Froude)
Henry Sylvester Williams had organised the first Pan-African Conference. Arthur Andrew Cipriani became the dominant labour figure of his generation.
Williams attended Tranquillity School and then Queen’s Royal College. The Island Scholarship could take a Trinidadian boy to Britain. Williams won it. A football injury damaged his hearing while he was still a student and he later wore a hearing aid for much of his public life.
Williams left Trinidad with the Island Scholarship, went to Oxford, and returned a historian who understood accounts. He had seen through slavery and racism. He saw the numbers and profits. How people were systemically dehumanised in order to be used as cheap labour, and then freed.
Like Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Williams belonged to a generation of writer-politicians. Nehru wrote An Autobiography, Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India. Williams wrote The Negro in the Caribbean, Capitalism and Slavery, Education in the British West Indies, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, British Historians and the West Indies, Inward Hunger and From Columbus to Castro.
Capitalism and Slavery changed the way generations of Caribbean readers approached slavery and empire. British abolition ceased to be the whole story. Sugar, labour, shipping, banks, merchants, plantations and profit moved to the centre of the page. After Williams, it became harder to discuss the empire without discussing money.
Writing was one thing. Ruling was another.
From 1955 into the 1956 campaign, Williams lectured in Woodford Square on race, slavery, federation and self-government, then took the same lectures across the country. He called Woodford Square the University of the People.
Williams, the politician, was as reviled, as bitterly distrusted as he was deified. Power stayed concentrated around him. Williams led the PNM from 1956 until his death in 1981. He was Chief Minister, Premier and then Prime Minister, and election followed election with him at the top. The criticism was that the lecturer of Woodford Square became the centre of the state, and that dissent inside and outside the party was audible but largely impotent.
Labour never forgot the Industrial Stabilisation Act of 1965, which imposed compulsory arbitration and restricted strikes and industrial action. Williams defended this restriction on trade union power as necessary to control industrial disorder.
The year 1970 left another mark. During the Black Power crisis, Williams declared a State of Emergency and detained movement leaders. The arrests, emergency powers and army mutiny at Teteron created further mistrust and sullied his claims of democracy.
Race hardened under Williams. He was not responsible for the divide between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians. Slavery, indentureship, land ownership, religion, education and colonial administration had already shaped much of that history. The PNM became identified largely with Afro-Trinidadian advancement in education and the public service, while many Indo-Trinidadians remained tied to agriculture, village life, business and later the professions. The political language around that resonates loudly and distastefully, to this day.
Williams’ personality, not unlike Nehru’s, personified ultimate power. The dark glasses, the cigar, the hearing aid, his autocratic suppression of dissent, and the title “Father of the Nation” created fear, respect and resentment in equal measure.
Williams’ biggest legacy was free education. This opened secondary schools and universities to families who could never have afforded them, built a middle class of teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, civil servants and writers, and gave children from every race and class a chance to find their way in the world.
Dr Eric Williams died at the Prime Minister’s residence in St Ann’s on March 29, 1981. The uncertainty that followed his death, before George Chambers emerged as his successor, exposed the extent to which political authority had become concentrated in one man. His body lay at the Red House, where officials estimated that nearly half the country filed past the casket. The Woodford Square crowd came back to salute him.
Unlike Nehru, whose home and library are part of India’s living public memory, Williams has almost disappeared from the visible landscape of T&T. Williams’s former official residence at 11 Mary Street, St Clair, was sold and is the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See. His papers are preserved, and his name remains on institutions, but the country has not made him available to itself in any sustained way. The image of the man in dark glasses and a hearing aid survived better than his books.
He is not alone. T&T has been careless with its prime ministers. They leave office and become portraits, airport names, school names, party slogans, scandals, caricatures and grudges. We do not work through their strengths and failures. We do not build from historical memory. Every new leader starts with contempt for his or her predecessors and makes the same mistakes over and over again.
One can find many instances of Dr Eric Williams’ hubris and flaws. But his fine mind was in the right place.
Dr Eric Williams should be read again and again.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
