Eric Eustace Williams

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eric Williams (1962)

Eric Eustace Williams TC (born September 25, 1911 in Port of Spain ; † March 29, 1981 ibid) was a Trinidadian historian and politician and from 1956 to 1959 as Chief Minister , then as Prime Minister and until his death in 1981 as Prime Minister of the Head of Government his country.

Life

Williams attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain and received a scholarship to the University of Oxford . In 1938 he received his doctorate in philosophy . In 1939 he went to the USA at Howard University . In 1955 he returned to Tobago and the following year founded the People's National Movement , a political party.

He won the election in the same year and was first Chief Minister on October 28, 1956. During his tenure in 1958 he incorporated Trinidad and Tobago into the West Indian Federation and insisted on a strong central government. In 1959, as part of a cabinet order ( Order in Council ), the office of Chief Minister was renamed Premier and given some extended rights. From July 9, 1959 to December 1961, Williams was prime minister. That month the Trinidadian government decided to leave the West Indian Federation and Williams' office was renamed Prime Minister. It led the island nation to independence on August 31, 1962 and finally to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago on August 1, 1976. He remained Prime Minister until his death on March 29, 1981. He died of the long-term effects of a diabetic coma . In 2002 he was posthumously awarded the Trinity Cross , the highest order of Trinidad at the time.

Because of his work, Williams is often referred to as the "father of the nation". Its popularity lasted until 1970 and then declined after an economic crisis and because of its authoritarian leadership style that led to violence by the Black Power movement .

Eric E. Williams as a historian

An important historiographical work on the transatlantic slave trade comes from Williams, who himself came from a family that became rich in the 19th century with the help of the slave trade , which began in 1807 in the British sphere of influence . The book Capitalism and Slavery , published in 1944, is based on the basic assumption that the abolition of the slave trade by the British in 1807 was less humanitarian than purely economic. The soils of the West Indies, on which most of the slaves were used within the British Empire, were depleted by the intensive cultivation of sugar cane and unsuitable for further exploitation. The rise of British capitalism was made possible by the profits from the West Indian slave trade, more precisely by the plantation economy. The later development of (British) capitalism at the turn of the 19th century caused the spread of free wage labor and the suppression of slavery, which was (almost) completely eliminated by the end of the 19th century. The second British Empire (after the North American War of Independence) concentrated on Asia, where free labor was in abundance and the institution of slavery was therefore not necessary. Williams sees racism as the reason for the enslavement of millions of Africans not as a cause, but as a consequence.

His thesis has since been criticized by many historians as one-sided, pointing out that the economic decline of the West Indies only began after the ban of 1807. It has recently been suggested that sugar cane cultivation in the West Indies was indeed profitable well into the 1830s. Nevertheless, Capitalism and Slavery is still considered an influential work in the historiography of the Caribbean and West India and has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Russian.

In 1998 the Eric Williams Memorial Collection was set up at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago and opened by Colin Powell . It contains Williams' 7000 volume private library, manuscripts, historical studies and research sketches.

Works

  • 1944: Capitalism and Slavery.
  • 1964: History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago.
  • 1964: British Historians and the West Indies.

literature

  • Barbara Solow, Stanley Engerman: British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams. 1987.
  • Seymour Drescher: Econocide: British Slavery in the Aera of Abolition . 2nd Edition. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2010, ISBN 978-0-8078-9959-5 .
  • Una McGovern (Ed.): Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Chambers, Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 .
  • Eric E. Williams , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 32/1981 of July 27, 1981, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bridget Brereton: A History of Modern Trinidad 1783–1962 . 4th edition. Terra Verde Resource Center, Champs Fleurs 2009, ISBN 978-0-435-98116-7 , pp. 244 .
  2. ↑ A nation loses its 'Father' . In: Trinidad Express . March 20, 2011.
  3. ↑ OAS.org: The Decade for People of African Descent. Retrieved April 10, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Joachim Meißner, Ulrich Mücke, Klaus Weber: Black America: A history of slavery. Beck, Munich 2008, p. 78.
  5. ^ David Richardson: The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1807. In: PJ Marshall (Ed.): The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume II: The Eighteenth Century. 1998.
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Eric Eustace
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Trinidadian historian and politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Port of Spain
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1981
PLACE OF DEATH Port of Spain