The Uses and Disadvantages of Eric Williams as a Caribbean Historian
If we truly understand Eric Williams — the historian — and we grasp how his ideas were part of the socialization of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago — as a nation, as a people, as a hierarchy of social classes — then we see the uses and disadvantages of his scholarly ideas not just his government policies.
Before discussing his most famous work, Capitalism & Slavery (1944), we wish to remind of three concerns that motivate this concise review of that work of history.
(1) Eric Williams is occasionally placed in scholarly frameworks of a “Black Radical Tradition.” The widespread ignorance of those who equate Williams with radicalism is informed by two facts that are not sufficiently known worldwide.
(2) From 1942–1955, Eric Williams was an employee of the Anglo-American Commission, the post-World War II imperialist body that coordinated the conquering of the Caribbean. Williams was an agent of empire it cannot be denied; he declares as much in his autobiography Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister.
(3) Eric Williams was almost overthrown in the Black Power revolution of February — April 1970 in Trinidad and Tobago by a gathering of industrial and city workers, peasant farmers, unemployed, students, and a faction of the army that mutinied at Teteron Barracks in Chaguaramas. He was seen as the Trinidadian counterpart to the “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and likened to Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic as “Generalissimo Williams” by the insurgent rising. He suppressed dissidents throughout the 1970s, commanding a “Flying Squad” secret police force through commissioner Randolph Burroughs that notoriously murdered Black guerrillas in the National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF), including a seventeen-year-old Beverly Jones, confined C.L.R. James to house arrest, and conducted raids on the offices of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union (OWTU).
Agents of Empire, Those We Overthrow, Are Not Guides for Socialization
We at Clash! find it disturbing when elders and activist veterans of the Black Power uprising in Trinidad suggest in public that whatever their differences with Williams’s government policies, they find his histories have made a valuable contribution to Trinidad and Tobago’s national development.
We say on the contrary, that this distorts and falsifies the anti-colonial and post-colonial struggle, and legitimates professionals who aspire to work for the political police and national security as defined by repressing the self-directed liberating activity of ordinary people. Further, it has manufactured a Black and Indian capitalist mentality veiled by a false pretense to oppose the empire of capital, where the Age of American Empire is passively accepted and not fought.
Mystification During the Age of American Empire
Eric Williams’s most famous history book was Capitalism & Slavery (1944). A product of his doctoral dissertation written at Oxford University, some retreating apologists for his legacy know the banner title suggests commitments they cannot fulfill. So, we are reminded in subsequent publications that he really wrote about British capitalism and British slavery. This emphasis in an Age of American Empire is startling in its mystification.
Political scientist Adom Getachew argues that Capitalism & Slavery underscored how: (1) The institution of slavery fueled capitalist development in the Global North; and (2) Its contemporary utility is a justification for the call for reparations to ameliorate the devastated Caribbean underdeveloped by the slave trade.
This summary is valuable but leaves much unsaid. The insurgent movement of ordinary Trinbagonians against Williams and his government necessitates not only an analysis of the relationship between capitalist core and periphery, but an analysis of the classed hierarchies and local capital in the periphery itself. For Williams, the great tragedy of the Industrial Revolution was that it deprived an aspiring class of capitalists in the periphery of the opportunity to accumulate capital alongside their metropolitan counterparts.
More to the point, however, an exclusive focus on state actors in the core and periphery obscures the fact that Williams was a piece of shit — an agent of imperialism who was nearly overthrown by ordinary people in his own country. Clash! repeats these facts because we know that a progressive intelligentsia in North America often minimizes basic facts of tyranny and mass democratic rejection of rulers when it is carried out by post-civil rights, post-colonial Black and Indian overseers of servile lives.
Five Preposterous Propositions About Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery
Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery is organized around five basic propositions that are preposterous for how they reinforce this false socialization we’ve been speaking. Professional historians, who pretend they have no philosophy of history while serving states and ruling classes, tell us we must be objective. We can’t write about the past as if it could foreshadow the present and future. Of course, that is what schooling in a capitalist society actually does. It provides a conditioning for hierarchy and domination. Here is how Williams did it — as an historian.
First, Williams wrote a history which was also an analysis of Atlantic world political economy up to the British abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. He started a precedent that Caribbean socialization in the twentieth century would be based on what happened before 1833. That is what the CARICOM governments’ slavery reparations campaign advocates today as it seeks to accumulate capital for the state and its private sector partners at the expense of ordinary people and toilers.
The Trinidad and Caribbean Future is Based on What Happened Before 1833 not after 1970
Second, he did this, of course, by suggesting modern capitalism had a false moral pretense. Particularly, British capitalism claimed its commerce and trade policies were rational and moral. Somehow Williams discussed slavery without an emphasis on the social motion of slave revolt, or its popular self-directed qualities, whether in pursuit of marronage or some other liberating community formation.
Neither did he highlight the African heritage of the enslaved or the sadistic brutality that enslaved people had faced. Remember, Williams received a job with the Anglo-American Commission years before formal independence in Trinidad and Tobago. Most professional historians only can find security by indirectly, if not directly, securing such a relationship to empire — but the modes of rule of empire evolve. A secure university instructor offers service to the Chamber of Commerce, or the Empire’s foreign affairs ministries, or does not get very far. Though many wish to pretend and take payments from both sides, one cannot advise both imperial and peripheral governments at the same time. But if you do, you must write in a manner that doesn’t disturb authority.
Claims About Global Commerce and Trade Being Rational and Moral
Still, one should expect that empire elaborates ways to critique racism that are acceptable and those that are not. The dividing line seems to be not simply those that question authority but wish to overthrow them and arrange society in a manner where professionals are abolished as the embodiment of culture and government. Williams, the model for socializing generations of collaborators in the Caribbean, is a firewall against this. Like contemporary corporate racial disparities discourse, he pioneered the idea that the Caribbean should want what white racists want for themselves.
Third, Williams created a discourse that underlined that both the American revolution against the British and the attitude of British settler-colonizers in the Caribbean to their mother country was similar. They were in rebellion not against capitalism but in defense of free trade. That the imperial center had underdeveloped — wait for it — their pursuit of capital accumulation.
Black Capitalists Critique of White Liberalism and Progressives
Fourth, Williams could appear to be a thorn in the side of British liberal, and British Labour Party sentiment, where his history emphasized that despite debates between British Abolitionists and British capitalists who were highly invested in the slave trade, both tried to claim a moral or philanthropic justification for their capitalist political economy that implied a foreshadowing of modern conceptions of human rights.
Williams explained behind these projections, some sincere more than others, was naked economic self-interest. Keep this proposition in mind for contemporary post-independence politics. Are there forms of ‘Black’ self-interest that can be placed forward as somehow cooperative? Aspiring rulers that speak in the spirit of defending “the nation” do so, even where those with an attention span can see they collaborate with the empire to subordinate not themselves (for they are living a delightful life) but the toilers below.
A Moral and Philanthropic Justification for a Capitalist Political Economy
Fifth, Williams is credited with contributing to a truly pedestrian debate in academic historiography on capitalism and slavery, where many inquired were slave traders motivated more by economic or racist considerations? Many contemporary obscene agendas can argue both sides of this framework.
Obviously, this was no contradiction, except for the simple minded, and ultimately this makes Williams a forerunner of the contemporary framework of racial capitalism, an ambiguous framework that undermines insurgency. It is based on a world systems analysis, a specific school of thought, that argued the bourgeois revolutions or the coming to power of aspiring middle classes all over the world, evolved unevenly. How many grasp that the critique of racial capitalism is meant to cheer on the Black middle class? If you know Eric Williams’s historical ideas, what else could it be?
Were White Capitalists motivated by profits or brutality against Black people more? Why does nobody ask this about the contemporary Caribbean political class?
Slave traders and owners, as capitalists were motivated by profits. Sometimes their terror and viciousness knew no end; slave masters would cut off the enslaved’s arm or breast to break the spirit of the Black community. It was irrational, for this was like buying a tractor to work the fields to produce cotton, tobacco, or sugar and then flattening its tires. Racial capitalism could be irrational like that in its sadistic brutality.
Is there another type of capitalism, more rational, that can be administered by the post-colonial Caribbean political class? Does the color or ethnic heritage or gender of overlords rationalize capitalism and its hierarchies? Are pursuit of profits normatively a rational non-violent endeavor?
Motivated by the Reason of Profits, Expressing Sadistic Brutality
Malcolm X famously said “you can’t have capitalism without racism.” Yet, many debased Africans and Indian elites in the Caribbean keep wanting it anyway. It is easy to chatter about the search to control the politics and economics of our nations and communities. So long as nobody takes too seriously a discussion of the terms of order of these politics and economics.
Such observations and statements, whether of Malcolm X or Eric Williams (about ‘capitalism & slavery’), do not clarify if one is opposed to capitalism, desires a fairer capitalism, is insulted by white capitalism, is for a state plan leading national capital accumulation, or is for a self-directed socialism where Black and colonized labor directly holds the reins of society.
Eric Williams was masterful in writing a history and political economy that talked about labor but left workers and the unemployed nothing to identify with except racial capitalism was unfair or capitalism was hypocritical, especially as it shaped the lives of colonized peoples.
Talking About How Capitalism is Unfair, Leaving Labor’s Self-Emancipation Nothing to Identify
What is said to be unfair or hypocritical doesn’t get to the root. Getting to the root is not a cheap trope of history or sociology. It would mean objecting to the same political and economic behavior no matter who carried it out. If you are against prisons in the U.S., you are against them in Cuba. If you are against police murder under white police chiefs in UK, you are against it under Black police chiefs in Trinidad or Guyana. Who but a charlatan or fool would object to this?
Eric Williams by this measure, even Williams the scholar, is no model for socialization of Caribbean youth or a society. For it prepares the Caribbean to identify with the post-colonial state, including its coercive apparatus as legitimate and the economy of nonsense that it serves.
While we cannot forget that virulent white racists will turn red-faced in the presence of any social criticism by people of color (no matter the quality), this cannot and has never been the measure of any pillar of the Black radical tradition. For such pillars are qualitative in their militancy, insurgent confrontation, and projections for designing a new society. Or if this is doubtful, its a warning to the dying enemy, so we can cease falling short of what we could be. Williams’s ideas foreshadowed a world where Black people and other people of color would become propertied and police the poor — nothing more.
What is Caribbean Anti-Colonial Nationalism Historically Based? American and European Settler-Colonizers and Slave Masters’ Gripes?
Somehow Capitalism & Slavery’s tropes about the American Revolution and the European settler-colonists morphed into something else entirely. Remember it was an empirical gathering of information that recorded a dispute among aspiring white capitalists! The white planter and slave master versus the imperial center out of which the slave ships were launched and returned. Out of this a preposterous conclusion, entirely new meanings have mutated and been drawn.
Scholars understand that people ascribe meanings to texts that there may be no basis for whatsoever. But so far no Trinidadian and Caribbean scholars that we are aware have explored this historical and political problem. If they have done so, they remain in obscurity.
White Racist Capitalism Model for Caribbean National Development?
The main interpretation of Capitalism & Slavery today is how Britain underdeveloped the economic growth or national development of the Caribbean. Despite Britain’s debates in parliament about what terms of commerce are moral, as self-interested and hypocritical as these obviously had been, Williams paved the way for a moral critique of the empire of capital that accepted a subordinate partnership for the Caribbean. The uses of this historical narrative is a socialization for defeat except for the Caribbean elite who have enjoyable propertied lives no matter those struggling below.
Further, with utmost hypocrisy Williams, in criticizing British and European morality through their unfair trade and taxation policies, he suggested in fact a moral path for Caribbean capitalist development was possible. But that as every moderately informed ethical person knows is impossible. Further, being alert to a historical problem does not make one take action.
History as Political Economy: With No Social Motion of the Enslaved or Colonized
The weakness of Capitalism & Slavery is it recorded no social motion of the enslaved or colonized. Capitalism & Slavery has a peculiar conclusion inserted by CLR James reminding us that Britain would not have abolished slavery if they did not fear the self-organization and self-emancipation of the enslaved themselves would soon bring it about. Otherwise, there is no social motion of ordinary Caribbean people at all in Williams’s historical “masterpiece” that informed his false political slogan “massa day done.”
And there is no real social motion in most books by Caribbean historians at home and abroad. Instead the common philosophy of history is to show the evolution of how the post-colonial nation-state came to be. Its legitimacy is taken as self-evident. Great for national anthems and pledges of allegiance, this is not a unique blemish of Caribbean scholars. Trained scholars all over the world roll over, play dead, and jump for snacks on command. But what of “radical” scholars?
Williams did contribute to James’s The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, which did not uncritically celebrate the establishment of the first Black republic but in fact concluded with the rebellion of Black toilers against the Black political class and warned openly of neocolonialism long before this was fashionable. What did Williams add or underscore in The Black Jacobins? That the French political economy as directed by J.B. Colbert’s “exclusive” or centralized state planning undermined the capital accumulation of the French settler-colonists in Haiti. Is the pattern in Williams’s thought, and as a model of conditioning Caribbean thought, becoming clear? Learning from the French colonizer, perhaps the state planner who coordinates a plan for national capitalism, not everyday people, could be heroic in some way.
Did You Know Eric Williams Concluded European Capitalism Not Fair to White Settler-Colonizers and Slave Owners?
An ethical observer might discover, if it is of doubtful contemporary use, that in Eric Williams, the reader actually discovered European capitalism was not fair to its white settler-colonizers and slave owners. Surely a peculiar platform for contemporary slavery reparations. A laughable premise for a pillar of the Black radical tradition to be based.
To be clear, this was Williams’s empirical conclusion — about the burdens of the peripheral white colonial capitalists. The gathering of data got him no further. And no “decolonial” criticism has ever thrashed him for this. Surely, the Caribbean, at least its scholars, is known for high rates of literacy. How could this be?
Macchiavellian or Marxist: It Stinks to High Heaven
Historical interpretation is often Machiavellian just as much as Marxist. It can be both. And the analysis of economic history is not simply useful for those trying to liberate themselves but scoundrels who will pursue power under any demeaning terms at the expense of everyday people.
Williams is one of the pioneers of the mentality that if white folks can complain while stealing and exploiting and pretending to be moral, then thinking and growing rich at the expense of the conquered can be a Black choice.
Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery indeed is the intellectual foundation for the contemporary Reparations campaign. It is sponsored and advanced by CARICOM, that despicable gathering of hierarchical governments, elitist planners, and professional administrators who have hijacked the project of Caribbean unity from everyday people across the region.
The reparations campaign makes no moves to directly empower the Caribbean toiler or unemployed, not with more philanthropy and welfare provisions, but by taking decision making power away from the outrageous Caribbean frauds that stalk the region.
This is the legacy of Eric Williams, not simply the politician, but the historian. Williams was never concerned about the political and economic freedom of the Caribbean but attended many gatherings where it was discussed with the transparent enemies of Caribbean people.
Getting A Piece of the Action: The Empire’s Responsibility?
The contemporary mentality in the Caribbean that the pursuit of private property and the profit motive is legitimate (depending on if people of color get a piece of the action) reveals basic post-colonial socialization has failed. Further, the notion that Britain and the United States are imperial powers that have some social responsibility to the rest of the world for sharing the wealth they have historically over-lorded or accumulated is not anti-imperialist but a refurbishing of begging.
Can those who conquer and rule be more inclusive and empower the masses by thin calls for more social infrastructure (a code word for putting a bow and giftwrap on degrading wage labor and capital relations)? This is a product of Williams as model for Caribbean socialization of professionals and the formally educated. Did he not work for an agency before leading ‘the movement for independence’ that thought the economic future of the Caribbean should be under the direction of global capital and its preferred imperial nation-states? Remember, he got this job after publishing Capitalism & Slavery.
Maybe it’s time documented agents of the state and the empire of capital should not be permitted to be Caribbean freedom movement thought leaders anymore. Further, if historians in the radical tradition can’t discover the insurgent democratic social motion of toilers of color against the pillars of their “radical traditions,” we need to clarify how their thin and empty analysis, even of capitalism and slavery, contributes to the barbarism that needs overthrow not repairing today.
Racist Jailers and Anti-Colonial Scholars Agree: Capitalism & Slavery is a Subversive Book
Frantz Fanon made the point that in order for a decolonized mind to avoid internalizing racial pathologies, one cannot simply react to them. Instead, we must sustain and place on ourselves our own values. This has nothing to do with whether white racists approve or disapprove of something.
Angela Davis recalled in a recent Eric Williams memorial lecture, saluting the legacy of a man almost overthrown by masses of people of color, that when she was imprisoned in 1971, for being a communist professor associated with political prisoners trying to free themselves, she asked her white racist jailers to allow her to read Capitalism & Slavery. The white racist peckerwoods objected. They saw the words “capitalism” and “slavery” and thought this must be a subversive book! But the Caribbean scholars wielding empirical facts but no insurgent social motion also like to think so.
Was Davis’s understanding much more advanced than this? What about almost forty years later where she campaigned for Barack Obama, not once but twice to be president, suggesting he was a threat to Wall Street? There is no need here to mobilize empirical facts to show that Angela Davis was wrong about how the capitalist world system felt about Obama. He was no threat to the empire of capital. Obama bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, was an apologist for police, repressed freedom of the press and whistle blowers, and murdered and target assassinated people of color abroad by drones without trial.
Davis is a scholar who constantly writes criticism of the state and capitalism, proclaims herself a prison abolitionist (but not in Cuba), and has been steadily employed for decades. There must be a method, a means, and a type of conditioning, if not party politics, that allows people to talk about “capitalism” and “slavery” in a manner, gathering empirical data, making a big show of getting to the root, when in fact very little is understood. Or maybe a whole lot is cleverly comprehended, how to sustain a miseducation that doesn’t bring the new society closer but power and authority for oneself and ‘progressive’ friends above society.
In Caribbean and Globally: Giving Aid & Comfort to Half the Ruling Class
There are ways to disturb half the ruling class while giving aid and comfort to the other half of the empire in the world. It is also true in the politics of peripheral nations. Considering we know Eric Williams openly worked for the empire and was almost overthrown by toilers of color in Trinidad & Tobago, and these facts are not widely known or talked about all over the world (even where empirical facts are revered and getting to the root is said to be valued) reveals the uses and abuses of Eric Williams as historian.
Williams’s place in Caribbean and world history functions to undermine radical democratic political life. This may be separate and related to the matter that there are activists for the government, and communists for capitalism that also do this — in the Caribbean and on a world scale. In fact, Eric Williams, the anti-communist, and enemy of labor and the unemployed of color, is embraced by such people as part of a radical tradition. Now, who playing the ass with history?
