Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean

Colin A. Palmer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807888506
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Born in Trinidad, Eric Williams (1911-81) founded the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago's first modern political party in 1956, led the country to independence from the British culminating in 1962, and became the nation's first prime minister. Before entering politics, he was a professor at Howard University and wrote several books, including the classic Capitalism and Slavery. In the first scholarly biography of Williams, Colin Palmer provides insights into Williams's personality that illuminate his life as a scholar and politician and his tremendous influence on the historiography and politics of the Caribbean. Palmer focuses primarily on the fourteen-year period of struggles for independence in the Anglophone Caribbean. From 1956, when Williams became the chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago, to 1970, when the Black Power-inspired February Revolution brought his administration face to face with a younger generation intellectually indebted to his revolutionary thought, Williams was at the center of most of the conflicts and challenges that defined the region. He was most aggressive in advocating the creation of a West Indies federation to help the region assert itself in international political and economic arenas. Looking at the ideas of Williams as well as those of his Caribbean and African peers, Palmer demonstrates how the development of the modern Caribbean was inextricably intertwined with the evolution of a regional anticolonial consciousness. Capitalism and Slavery. In the first scholarly biography of Williams, Colin Palmer provides insights into Williams's personality that illuminate his life as a scholar and politician and his tremendous influence on the historiography and politics of the Caribbean. Palmer focuses primarily on the fourteen-year period of struggles for independence in the Anglophone Caribbean, when Williams was at the center of most of the conflicts and challenges that defined the region. Looking at the ideas of Williams as well as those of his Caribbean and African peers, Palmer demonstrates how the development of the modern Caribbean was inextricably intertwined with the evolution of a regional anticolonial consciousness.
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CHAPTER 1

INTELLECTUAL
DECOLONIZATION

"The history of our West Indian islands can be expressed in two simple words: Columbus and Sugar," Eric Williams proclaimed in a lecture he delivered at the Trinidad Public Library on April 19,1944. As he awaited the publication of Capitalism and Slavery later that year, the young historian was preparing the ground for the reception of its bitter assault on colonialism. His audience on that April day was comprised mainly of the local intelligentsia, many of whom were English and therefore white. Entitled "The British West Indies in World History," the talk must have made some of his listeners uncomfortable as Williams underscored many unpleasant truths about the region's history. "The West Indian islands were discovered," he said, "to assist in the solution of Europe's problems. Thus they were from the very beginning, an extension of Europe overseas."¹

In this speech Williams was focusing on the themes that he had addressed on previous occasions and that would be the signifiers of his career. His preoccupation with colonialism—its impact on the colonizers and the colonized—was not an empty intellectual exercise to advance his reputation or to score academic points. Rather, it was a consequence of his familiarity with imperial power as a citizen of colonial Trinidad and Tobago, his racially unpalatable experiences in England as a student, his deep understanding of the nature of colonialism, and his vision of a world free from the excesses of the past. Williams's condemnation of colonialism was not restricted to its expression in the Caribbean. He was consistent in his criticism of colonial rule in Asia and Africa. The colonized peoples, regardless of their ethnicity or location, were his brethren, his partners in suffering, and brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice and independence.

Eric Williams was born and came to maturity at a time when Liberia, Ethiopia, and Haiti were the only predominantly black African and Carib- bean nations free from colonial rule. He was knowledgeable about the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s, the occupation of Haiti by the Americans, and the denigration of peoples of African descent everywhere. Years later, Williams recalled the ways in which he and his contemporaries were socialized as colonial subjects. "The intellectual equipment with which I was endowed by The Trinidad school system," Williams wrote in his autobiography, "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."²

Williams was harshly critical of the other deleterious effects of the colonial education he received. He considered his schooling "un-West Indian." "My training," he added, "was divorced from any thing remotely suggestive of Trinidad and the West Indies." Only the academically weaker students were expected to study West Indian history. "What the school disparaged," Williams wrote, "the society despised."³

Having won a highly coveted island scholarship, Williams left for Oxford University in 1932to read for a degree in history. Specializing in British colonial history, he confessed that he took "a very independent line" with his tutor, R. Trevor Davies.⁴ Williams distinguished himself academically and was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1939; his dissertation was entitled "The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery." This work was later revised and published as Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Williams's confrontation in England with a crude British racism left an indelible impression on him.White students doubted his intellectual capacity and some even ridiculed him. Williams believed that his race also placed him at a disadvantage when he applied for a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1935.⁵

Although he had a profound appreciation for the achievements of the English over time, Williams rejected the racism that characterized their relationship with the black and brown peoples they colonized. Thus, his unrelenting assault on colonialism had multifaceted underpinnings. As a historian, he was deeply cognizant of the ways in which colonialism was justified intellectually by metropolitan scholars and of the necessity for the colonized to confront and undermine such claims. As a scholar, he understood the structural relationship between the imperial powers and their colonies and the ways in which colonialism fostered the exploitation of its victims. As a child of colonialism, Williams knew firsthand the psychological damage experienced by colonized peoples, forcing him to assume the burden of helping to make the people of Trinidad and Tobago whole again. As a politician, his mission was to free his society from all vestiges of colonial rule.

Williams was highly conversant with the works of such imperial scholars and writers as Thomas Carlyle, Edward Long, Lord Macaulay, Reginald Coupland, and Arnold Toynbee. None of these intellectuals doubted the essential superiority of Europeans, although twentieth-century writers like Coupland and Toynbee never defended slavery or supported its reintroduction. But their descriptions of African peoples were suffused with a distressing cultural chauvinism at best and a barely disguised racism at its worst. To Toynbee, Africans arrived in the Americas "spiritually as well as physically naked" but possessing a "childlike spiritual intuition." Coupland extolled the virtues of British colonial rule and praised the humanitarian impulses of the British, especially in regard to the emancipation of enslaved people.⁶ Such nationally self-serving scholarship led Williams to observe that "the British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it."⁷

As a descendant of enslaved Africans and as a scholar, Williams was on secure ground when he claimed that "the most offensive statements ever made in terms of the capacity or the incapacity of certain peoples have been made by historians in the universities." "Imperialist historians," he argued, "openly set out to despise the West Indian capacity, and today you are independent."⁸ The influence of these scholars, he maintained, permeated all sectors of British society, affecting attitudes and governmental policies. Referring to historians at universities, Williams charged: "It is they who[,] in the British circles in particular, were able to penetrate the ranks of the people who became the members of Parliament, the members of the Cabinet running the government, the members of Parliament making the laws for the colonies, the administrators and governors governing the colonies, creating a climate in the public mind which is responsible for the attitude ... to West Indian areas and West Indian people today.⁹

Familiar with the disparaging ways in which colonized people had been depicted by imperial scholars, Williams called upon them to reject the histories written by those who "sought only to justify the indefensible and to seek support for preconceived and outmoded prejudices."¹⁰ To him, the newly independent people of Trinidad and Tobago must reject "the intellectual concepts and attitudes worked out by metropolitan scholars in the age of colonialism." He proclaimed the "old intellectual world" dead, "strangled by the noose that it put around its own neck."¹¹

The men who inhabited that old intellectual world had a particular penchant for denigrating those upon whose backs British power partially rested. Thomas Carlyle dismissed the notion that blacks had any rights, ranked "the Demarara Nigger" just ahead of horses, and doubted the wisdom of emancipation in the West Indies. Slavery's demise, he said, had reduced blacks to a state of idleness, "each one carrying a rum bottle in his hand, no breeches on his body, pumpkin at discretion, and the fruitful region of the earth going back to jungle round him."¹²

Although Carlyle was especially vituperative in his assault on blacks, his ideas were broadly representative of British intellectual opinion on peoples of African descent and their capacities. Their pernicious assertions about these peoples undoubtedly reflected and shaped British popular opinion. Williams described such ideas and representations of West Indians as "the great lie of history," adding: "It is being exposed with all the ruthlessness that it deserves."¹³ He had dedicated his life "to the exposure of this lie, to the repudiation of the many calumnies and detractions with which we have been afflicted and to the filling of the gap caused by our long period of amnesia."¹⁴ But Williams did not see himself fighting this battle alone. Such calumnies, he contended, should be addressed by universities in newly independent countries. It was their task "to challenge, deliberately, all that has been written in respect of the national history. I mean the West Indies, Africa, Ghana, Tanganyika, etc.,all that has been written in the imperialist period."¹⁵

Aware that the colonial experience shaped the colonized in psychologically damaging ways, Williams knew that the task of intellectual decolonization would be difficult to accomplish. "It is one thing to get rid of colonialism," he said. "There will be joy before the angels of heaven for every imperialist sinner that repents but if you colonial nationalists think that it is as easy as that, I am afraid they have another thought coming to them. I go a little further than that. A lot of the colonial attitudes are not dead at all."¹⁶

In the context of mental decolonization, Williams emphasized the need for writing national histories. To him, the imperial powers had treated the West Indian islands as producers of sugar, ignoring them once that economic need became less compelling. The West Indies now formed in the popular imagination "a picture of fun-loving people, West Indians have been responsible for this picture, a place for tourists, a place where you could leave the United States with several inches of snow in the month of February or March, and get down and walk half-naked on the beaches, a place where you do nothing but drink rum punches and forget."¹⁷ To counteract this frivolous image, the islands needed to have their own national histories. It was "nonsense," however, to think that only West Indians could write their history, since "some of the most reactionary people in respect of colonialism ... are West Indians themselves."¹⁸ The colonial experience had left its imprint on these people, and embracing a different construction of themselves would be a slow, arduous process.

Ideas such as these were staples of Williams's rhetoric as scholar, teacher, and politician. The political education of the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, and by extension those of the West Indies as a whole, became his passion. An orator of considerable gifts and one given to a brilliant turn of the phrase, Williams used these talents to educate, cajole, chastise, and challenge his people. Employing all of his oratorical and intellectual gifts, Williams delivered his most famous and contentious speech on intellectual decolonization at the University of Woodford Square on March 22, 1961. Strident and combative in tone, brimming with the insight of the trained historian, Williams used the occasion to explain to his listeners why they had to destroy the shackles of the colonial past and command their future.

Williams's "Massa Day Done" speech, as this particular oration came to be known, was delivered at a time when nationalist movements were growing in strength in the colonial societies of Africa and Asia. India had won its independence in 1947 after a protracted struggle with the British. Ghana received its independence in 1957, thereby energizing nationalist movements in other parts of Africa. The Algerians contested French colonial authority by employing violence, and so did the Kenyans against the British. Although there was some nationalist fervor in the West Indies, it never attained the passion that characterized its counterpart in many African and Asian societies. The style of nationalist expression was more genteel, more muted, less confrontational, and less vituperative.

Williams was certainly aware of these nationalist sentiments in the Caribbean region; indeed, he had played a part in creating and shaping them. His first book, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), was an overt assault on colonial rule in the Caribbean as a whole. His second book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), provided the historical roots for his arguments and was a sustained attack on the extant scholarship on slavery's role in the construction of the British economy and on the humanitarian impulse in the abolition of slavery.

Williams, who had accepted a post with the British- and American-financed and controlled Anglo-American Caribbean Commission in 1945, had an uneasy and acrimonious relationship with his superiors. Emotionally committed to improving the condition of the Caribbean peoples, sensitive to their need to assume responsibility for their own destiny, and conscious of his intellectual superiority over his white bosses, Williams refused to be silenced or to modify his critique of colonial rule in accordance with their wishes. His personality prevented him from a supine acceptance of their orders and his high degree of political consciousness made such a response wholly impossible. When his superiors suggested that he withdraw an article that he had submitted for publication on race relations in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands on the ground that "the timing was not right," Williams declined: "It struck me that if West Indians are to think only when Britain and the United States consider it is the right time for them to do so, we will never think at all. ... I consider that each and every moment of each day and every day is a fit and proper time to attack racial discrimination and I said so."¹⁹

Williams was equally adamant in defending his Negro in the Caribbean from its detractors. Standing up to one of his superiors who thought that the book was not "objective,"²⁰ and who implied that he should repudiate it to save the Caribbean Commission embarrassment, Williams was "prepared to give no quarter and ask for none. I knew that if I yielded, they would wipe the floor with me forever after that."²¹ Williams, who prided himself on his historical skills to a fault, would brook no criticism of his work and certainly not from those who were the acknowledged defenders of the horrendous status quo. As he declared: "I was not prepared to listen to any criticism about my vested interests in the West Indies. I would not capitulate for one moment to those interests. No question of unfavorable reaction to my book could be maintained."²²

Eric Williams was relieved of his duties with the Commission in June 1955, his political and intellectual stands having become increasingly unpalatable to his superiors. As he explained, "I endured tortures at the Caribbean Commission, where I had to tolerate all sorts of metropolitan upstarts who thought my ideas for the future of the West Indies too extreme. Everywhere I went I met suppression." To Williams, the issues that led to his dismissal were "not personal but political; they involve not a single individual but the West Indian people."²³ This assertion, made within four hours of his dismissal to an audience of about twenty thousand people in Port of Spain, was not rhetorically empty, as subsequent developments would amply demonstrate. Williams was consciously seeking to depersonalize his conflict with the Caribbean Commission and to make it into a cause with which all colonized West Indians could identify. He was the black and gifted colonial whose efforts to enhance the lives of his people had been stymied at every turn. He had been crucified on the altar of colonial interests by men who defended an unjust status quo and who were the enemies of the people, inasmuch as they were his. By dismissing him so callously, the Commission had unintentionally liberated Williams to find his own voice and to put his talents at the disposal of the people of Trinidad and Tobago and their brethren elsewhere. "I was born here," Williams told his ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Intellectual Decolonization
• Chapter 2 - The Challenge of Political and Economic Integration
• Chapter 3 - The Struggle for Chaguaramas
• Chapter 4 - Eric Williams and the Golden Handshake
• Chapter 5 - Courting Grenada
• Chapter 6 - Bleeding Guiana
• Chapter 7 - Eric Williams, Africa, and Africans
• Chapter 8 - The Economics and Politics of Race
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography