Eric Williams and the Economic Truth of Slavery

When Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, he made two claims that British academia found nearly impossible to accept: that the profits from slavery had funded the Industrial Revolution and built modern Britain, and that Britain abolished slavery not out of moral goodness but because the Caribbean plantation system had become economically unsustainable. The book has been in print continuously everywhere except Britain, where historians effectively suppressed it for decades. As one admirer puts it on this episode of Trapped History, British historians "wrote almost as if Britain had introduced African slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it."

The Man Behind the Thesis

Eric Williams was born in Trinidad in 1911, a middle-class kid who earned a scholarship to Oxford, played rugby for the university, and graduated with a first in economics. When he tried to pursue a doctorate on the history of enslavement, he could not get funding—"pretty obviously for racist reasons," the episode notes. He eventually wrote the thesis anyway, and it became Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944 while the British Empire still existed. Williams later became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, making him one of the few historians ever to lead a country.