Historians and social scientists commemorated the centenary of Williams with a September 2011 conference at Oxford, and here present nine essays considerably revised from their presentations there. Williams was born in Trinidad and Tobago, studied history at Oxford University, and became a premier figure in the history and historiography of the anglophone Caribbean. Among the topics are Williams as a man of culture, the challenges of Caribbean integration, Capitalism and Slavery revisited: the "Williams Thesis" in Atlantic perspectives, the triangular trade from a global perspective, and the historiography of Brazilian slavery. Distributed in the US by Longleaf Services, Inc. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
This is the first comprehensive historical assessment of the career of Eric Williams, the scholar and statesman. Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1911, Eric Williams published his classic work Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 and several other books thereafter. A historian of outstanding talent, Williamss scholarly work has been the subject of various international conferences. He introduced a new era in the study of slavery, focusing less on the oppressive conditions of that odious system of labour and more on its role in the construction of Western capitalism. Historians are still animated by Williamss conclusions, and the questions he posed are still relevant to our mature understanding of the ways in which the African slave trade and slavery shaped the economies of a variegated group of societies.
Eric Williams was also the head of government of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 to 1981. He became the premier of his country in 1961 and its first prime minister in 1962. He died in 1981 after dominating the politics of his country for a quarter of a century. This volume also includes analyses of Williamss enormous contributions to the making of the modern Caribbean as a statesman and a scholar.
