Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 278
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-1-4422-3139-9 • Hardback • February 2014 • $136.00 • (£105.00)
978-1-5381-4708-5 • Paperback • August 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-4422-3140-5 • eBook • February 2014 • $42.50 • (£35.00)
Eric Williams was the most prominent intellectual from the English-speaking Caribbean in the twentieth century. He was a leader of West Indian independence and the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1955 to 1981.
Dale W. Tomich is professor emeritus of sociology and history at Binghamton University, State University of New York. William Darity Jr. is Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University.
Preface
Dale Tomich
Introduction: From the Dissertation to Capitalism and Slavery: Did Williams's Abolition Thesis Change?
William Darity Jr.
The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery
Eric Williams
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: The Impolicy of the Slave System
Chapter 2: The Superiority of the French West Indies
Chapter 3: East India Sugar
Chapter 4: The Attempt to Secure an International Abolition
Chapter 5: The West Indian Expeditions
Chapter 6: The Significance of the West Indian Expeditions
Chapter 7: The Abolition of the Slave Trade
Part II
Chapter 8: The Abolitionists and Emancipation
Chapter 9: The Foreign Slave Trade
Chapter 10: East India Sugar
Chapter 11: The Distressed Areas
Chapter 12: The Industrialists and Emancipation
Epilogue
Appendix I: "The Influential Men"
Appendix II: Ramsay as an Authority
Appendix III: The Intercolonial Slave Trade
Bibliography
The fact that Williams’s previously hard to access doctoral thesis is now available to the general public will help to clarify important aspects of the ‘Williams Thesis’ and its genesis. . . . The route from dissertation to final text runs parallel to Williams’s trajectory from a young black student combating racism and imperial narratives at Oxford to the future prime minister of an independent nation. Apart from being an important historiographical document, Williams’s dissertation is therefore also a historical source in its own right. . . . [R]econsidering the ‘making of’ the Williams Thesis can have a profound impact on how we view its later interpretations and current relevance. . . . The Economic Aspect provides important insights into the genealogy of the Williams Thesis that are much harder to grasp from the more polemical, and more layered text of Capitalism and Slavery. . . . The publication of The Economic Aspect finally makes it possible for a wider audience to retrace Williams’s steps. In the process, we can start to disentangle Williams’s complicated relationship to the Oxford imperial historians, radical predecessors and contemporaries, and the emerging anti-colonial struggles of his day.
— International Review Of Social History
Here readers will find the original formulation of some of the ideas that led to Eric Williams’s long-famous Capitalism and Slavery, which addressed, among a wide range of provocative issues, why Britain abolished the slave trade and slavery within its empire during the early years of the nineteenth century largely for strong economic rather than humanitarian reasons, though both sources of motivation carried weight. This new book shows the dissertation as a separate, if closely related, intellectual project of great insight. The published dissertation will surely awaken new interest in Williams's ideas that have sparked so much heated debate in their continued global relevance to issues related to capitalism, power, poverty, and much more.
— David Barry Gaspar, Duke University
A major publishing event for scholars and students of slavery, abolition, capitalism, and the Atlantic world. The appearance of Eric Williams's thesis will mark a turning point in the historical debates that his work has long fueled.
— Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University