History study guide

Dr. Williams was born on 25 September 1911. His father Thomas Henry Williams was a minor civil
servant, and his mother Eliza Frances Bossier (13 April 1888 – 1969) was a descendant of the
mixed French Creole elite. He saw his first school years at Tranquility Boys' Intermediate
Government School and he was later educated at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, where he
excelled at academics and football. A football injury at QRC led to a hearing problem which he wore
a hearing aid to correct. He won an island scholarship in 1932, which allowed him to attend St
Catherine's Society, Oxford (which subsequently became St Catherine's College, Oxford). In 1935,
he received first-class honors for his B.A in history, and was ranked in first place among University of
Oxford students graduating in History in 1935. He also represented the university at football. In 1938
he went on to obtain his doctorate (see section below). In Inward Hunger, his autobiography, he
described his experience of racism in Great Britain, and the impact on him of his travels
in Germany after the Nazi seizure of power.

Scholarly career[edit]
In Inward Hunger, Williams recounts that in the period following his graduation: "I was severely
handicapped in my research by my lack of money.... I was turned down everywhere I tried ... and
could not ignore the racial factor involved". However, in 1936, thanks to a recommendation made by
Sir Alfred Claud Hollis (Governor of Trinidad and Tobago, 1930–36), the Leather sellers'
Company awarded him a £50 grant to continue his advanced research in history at Oxford.[1] He
completed the D.Phils. in 1938 under the supervision of Vincent Harlow. His doctoral thesis was
titled The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery, and was
published as Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. It was both a direct attack on the idea that moral and
humanitarian motives were the key facts in the victory of British abolitionism, and a covert critique of
the idea common in the 1930s, emanating in particular from the pen of Oxford Professor Reginald
Copland, that British imperialism was essentially propelled by humanitarian and benevolent
impulses. Williams's argument owed much to the influence of C. L. R. James, whose The Black
Jacobins, also completed in 1938, also offered an economic and geostrategic explanation for the
rise of British abolitionism.
Gad Heuman states:
In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams argued that the declining economies of the British
West Indies led to the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. More recent research has
rejected this conclusion; it is now clear that the colonies of the British Caribbean profited
considerably during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.