Introduction: Symposium on the Life and Writings of Eric Williams

Abstract

... to inform of [the] past as an essential guide to ... future action.--Eric Williams, 31 August 1962 Earlier versions of the following three papers were presented at the 87th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), held in Orlando, Florida, in October 2002. session was devoted to The Papers of Williams: Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century, and was chaired by Professor Learie Luke of South Carolina State University. In their presentations Professors Selwyn Carrington, Howard University; David Barry Gaspar, Duke University; and Tony Martin, Wellesley College confirm that Williams by his mindset, writings, and activism belongs squarely within the pantheon of African American notables, albeit hailing from the West Indies. Williams was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and remained in office for a quarter of a century until his death in 1981. He not only led his country to independence from Great Britain (1962) and to republicanism (1976), but was also deeply involved in the movement for Caribbean integration and cooperation from the early 1940s, and was highly respected internationally, serving as one of the founding members of the Governing Council of the United Nations University headquartered in Japan. He was also at one time president of La Societe Africaine de Culture in Paris, France--otherwise known as Presence Africaine--which was associated with President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and although the mission never materialized, Williams was one of only four Commonwealth Prime Ministers selected to visit Vietnam, in hopes of mediating that years-long conflict. A noted historian, Williams by most accounts defined the study and greatly affected the writing of Caribbean history when he published his 1944 classic, & Slavery, an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation. By that time, Williams was Associate Professor of Social and Political Science at Howard University, where he compiled and edited its earliest three-volume social sciences textbook. Professor Martin's well-documented essay Eric Williams and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission: Trinidad's Future Nationalist Leader as Aspiring Imperial Bureaucrat, 1942-1944 vividly captures the high-powered circles in which Williams traveled in the 1940s and his eventual appointment to this internationally influential commission. Martin paints a picture of Williams both as scholar and activist who remained attached to his Caribbean roots and who used his position on the commission to demonstrate and advance his knowledge, research, and connections to the region in order to articulate the aspirations of his people. They could never have too much of my work was how Williams characterized his relationship in the 1940s with Dr. Carter G. Woodson and the prestigious Journal of Negro History. David Barry Gaspar's essay examines Williams' contributions to Journal of Negro History, the first of which--The Golden Age of the Slave System in Britain--won the $100.00 prize as the best article published in the journal in 1939. Well-prepared and documented, Williams' articles presented forceful arguments in support of his basic proposition that West Indian slavery and the slave trade were responsible for the rise of the British Industrial Revolution. This interpretation was considered revolutionary by many at that time, and thus Williams succeeded in catapulting himself to the attention of his regional and national constituencies as well as the colonial powers whose tug-of-war over the Caribbean would continue unchecked for decades. And the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, this perspective is even more relevant than perhaps Williams himself would have imagined, given the current controversy igniting passions globally over reparations for enslaved workers and their descendants. Selwyn Carrington's Capitalism & Slavery and Caribbean Historiography: An Evaluation describes how almost sixty years later, the book still informs the ongoing debate on the Atlantic Slave Trade. …