The Legacy of Eric Williams : Into the Postcolonial Moment [1 ed.] 9781626746985, 9781628462425

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The Legacy of eric WiLLiams

Anton L. Allahar and Shona N. Jackson Series Editors

The Legacy of

eric WiLLiams into the Postcolonial moment

edited by Tanya L. shields University Press of Mississippi • Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us Publication of this book was made possible in part by the University Research Council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Designed by Peter D. Halverson The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2015 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The legacy of Eric Williams : into the postcolonial moment / edited by Tanya L. Shields. pages cm. — (Caribbean studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62846-242-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62674-694-7 (ebook) 1. Williams, Eric Eustace, 1911–1983—Influence. 2. Williams, Eric Eustace, 1911–1983—Political and social views. 3. Trinidad and Tobago—Politics and government. 4. Trinidad and Tobago— Social policy. 5. Postcolonialism—Trinidad and Tobago—History. 6. Nationalism—Trinidad and Tobago—History. 7. Prime ministers—Trinidad and Tobago—Biography. 8. Scholars—Trinidad and Tobago—Biography. 9. Caribbean Area—Politics and government. 10. Caribbean Area—Relations. I. Shields, Tanya L., 1970– F2122.W5L34 2015 320.0972983—dc23 2014048863 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

conTenTs Foreword vii erica WiLLiams conneLL

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 3 Tomeiko ashford carTer, Tanya L. shieLds, and WiLLiam dariTy Jr.

i. Becoming eric WiLLiams 1. Eric Williams: The Legacy Continues 25 rex neTTLeford

2. Eric Williams: The Making of a West Indian Intellectual 39 maurice sT. Pierre

ii. PoLiTicaL WiLLiams 3. “We Integrate or We Perish”: Eric Williams, Forbes Burnham, and the Regional Integration Movement 75 ceciLia mcaLmonT

4. Eric Williams: Protagonist or Antagonist of Caribbean Integration? 97 sharon aLexander-gooding

5. Eric Williams and Color Stratification in the Caribbean 109 WiLLiam dariTy Jr.

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6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Eric Williams and the Labor Movement in Trinidad and Tobago, 1955–1981 126 Jerome TeeLucksingh

7. Eric Williams and Public Service Reform 149 roLand g. BaPTisTe

iii. TexTuaL WiLLiams

8. Inward Hunger: How Eric Williams Fails Postcolonial History 163 granT farred

9. Capitalism and Slavery Revisited: Remaking the Slave Commodity Frontier 172 daLe Tomich

Afterword: Reflections on Eric Williams and the Challenges of Postcolonial Caribbean Political Leadership 186 david hinds

Bibliography 194 Contributors 209 Index 214

foreWord When I was about fourteen years old, my father would talk to me periodically about his will, and I would always tell him, “I don’t want anything from you, Daddy. I just want your books and papers.” This from a person who failed high school history and, in her rebellious years, refused to go to university! In retrospect, I realize now that I instinctively knew their intrinsic value. Certainly that giddy teenager had no conception of what to do with the material; I only knew I had to have it. Now, irony of all ironies, I am the founder and curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum (EWMC), a vast historical archive housed at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad and Tobago. With the university’s three physical campuses in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Jamaica, the EWMC is UWI’s largest research collection, its “jewel in the crown”—the first of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean. Thus it has become a model for similar efforts by other organizations to establish museums in Trinidad and Tobago, the British Virgin Islands, and the Bahamas. I fancy that my father’s role was to create history, and mine is to preserve it. I have therefore devoted the thirty-three years since his passing to the propagation of his vision, about which I am passionate—formulating, directing, and implementing the collection’s myriad projects, all with the help and advice of numerous international scholars whom I am privileged to call my friends. I am convinced that it is only in the full glare of dispassionate research and investigation that Eric Williams’s true legacy will be understood and appreciated. With the EWMC now at the world’s disposal, the authors in this book, which examines the numerous facets of my father’s life and career— along with other writers, researchers, historians, and students—can use the EWMC’s resources to create new lenses through which to view both Williams’s successes and his failures. The chips will fall where they may, and some long-held opinions of my father—both positive and less so—may be either affirmed or negated. His achievements as scholar and statesman, however, vii

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will continue to lend definition and depth to the Caribbean community he so deeply cared for. In a glittering ceremony sixteen years ago, one that was bipartisan and national in scope and televised nationwide, former US secretary of state Colin L. Powell inaugurated the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum. The very next year, UNESCO named the EWMC to its prestigious Memory of the World Register, lauding the collection’s documentary heritage of both the region and Trinidad and Tobago. More than seven thousand books and journals constitute my father’s personal and eclectic library, covering a wide variety of disciplines—philosophy, religion, history, economics, politics, education, music, and art. While some rare books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enhance the collection’s inherent value, its greatest strength lies in the area of African and African American texts—Williams’s major interest—and the broad sweep of Caribbean history, both multilingual and comprehensive. The emphasis focuses not only on the Black West Indies but also on the various groups and their racial components—Amerindian, European, East Indian—that truly reflect the pan-Caribbean community. The EWMC also contains Williams’s published and unpublished works, drafts of his writings, research notes, historical documents, newspaper clippings, personal and official correspondence, a miscellany of conference and policy reports, and a substantial portion of the more than one thousand speeches, documents, publications, lectures, and books that make up his bibliography. More than 150 calypsos, many with trenchant social commentary about Williams’s policies and persona, complement this extraordinary archive. The collection also regularly solicits material for deposit from organizations and individuals whose recollections (which form a part of the EWMC’s Oral History Project) and memorabilia add to the collective discourse about the West Indian condition of yesteryear. According to former UWI history professor Brinsley Samaroo, the Williams papers prove that he was “a meticulous chronicler and keeper of snippets of information.” He regularly recorded the speeches of opponents to then mark off sections for later rebuttal, and he collected data on topics such as unemployment, crime, foreign relations, and education. With all this information at hand, as Samaroo explains, Williams “would then distill [it] in the crucible of his historical mind and craft [it] into . . . well-documented presentations.” Williams often rewrote his speeches, leaving the many versions behind, so that now scholars and students alike can trace the evolution of his thoughts.

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Eric Williams likewise possessed what Samaroo aptly describes as “a world view and [an] insatiable appetite . . . [for] all sorts of other non-historical matters. . . . He had a fondness for . . . Robert Frost’s soft nostalgic lines as [in] In the Clearing [and he] sought to understand the [East] Indian mind by reading . . . the works of Gandhi, Nehru and Naipaul”—all a part of the collection’s holdings. The EWMC contains several volumes of Shakespeare and the English romantics, and more than eight versions of the Bible. And the quirky lives here too: somewhere Williams picked up and read a Nutrition Almanac and the Yoga of Meditation and collected prints of artwork by Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Picasso, among other masters. But while the EWMC’s library and archives are largely responsible for a resurgence of interest in Williams’s intellectual and political contributions, it is the collection’s museum that piques the interest of those who visit—the general public included—and speaks to the soul of a nation. The museum displays photographs and memorabilia in the chronological order of his life—from love letters to his second wife, my mother, to Queen Elizabeth II’s message of regret at his impending 1973 resignation. It also contains a three-dimensional replica of Williams’s private study: a bottle of Quink ink sits amid the glorious confusion that is his desk; the jacket is slung casually over his chair, still with three pens in the pocket; the classical music he loved plays softly in the background; the half-filled wastebasket and his open briefcase stand at the ready—all these artifacts speak to a more complete picture of Eric Williams the man, rather than the myth. The unanticipated public response from all strata of society—friend and political foe alike—has been overwhelming. Indeed, it is almost as if the establishment of the collection, nearly a generation after my father’s passing, fulfilled some sort of unexpressed national need. People stopped me everywhere to thank me profusely, as though I had done some fantastic thing when I have merely followed my intuition, understanding that my father’s legacy needed to continue to have significance for the nation, the region, and indeed the world. This decision has amply been borne out by the fact that Eric Williams’s seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery, already published in seven languages—Russian, Chinese, and Japanese among them—has been translated into Turkish (2014), and a Korean edition is in process. Further, one of the EWMC’s most worthwhile endeavors is the ongoing lectureship at Florida International University in Miami. Now in its sixteenth year, the series’ 2012 co-topic was “Fifty Years after Independence: Is Eric Williams Still Relevant?”

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To date, thousands of the nation’s schoolchildren have visited the EWMC museum, and their comments are as telling of this relevance as they are profound. What the children express confirms for me the powerful influence of those figures who went before us, and more than ever, affirmations such as the following commit me to what I consider my life’s work: “I have been inspired to accomplish even greater heights for T&T and the Caribbean” (Keisha Lewis, first-year UWI student, 2000); “I vow to defend your promise and to honour our people” (Leslie Paul, Trinidad and Tobago high schooler, 2001); “Thank you for treasuring what is really ours” (Kimberley Correia, Trinidad and Tobago high schooler, 2002). Such is the privilege and responsibility of the EWMC. For students of all ages, from grade-schoolers learning the Williams name for the first time, to graduate degree candidates using the EWMC as a thesis topic, a wealth of information lies within the EWMC. As its former director stated in New Directions in University Education: “Through its outreach activities to the nation’s and region’s schools, the EWMC has promoted popular education, enlivened history, and challenged the intellectual . . . capacities of individuals.” What a treasure trove this is—one that is most expertly and exhaustively used in the book you have before you, which emanates from one of the five international conferences on Eric Williams, this one sponsored by the EWMC, Princeton University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The following chapters demonstrate how the EWMC has allowed researchers to view Williams through his own words, as well as through the words of those who heard him, learned from him, and even challenged him. But the EWMC is far more than simply a collection of books, papers, and artifacts. It is the fountainhead for future critical works that will enable and generate a greater understanding of the rich historical, economic, social, and cultural context of the West Indies. Among other initiatives, the EWMC organizes conferences, symposia, and lectures; sponsors a biennial essay competition in seventeen Caribbean countries and 178 schools; and actively encourages the republication and translation of Williams’s books. It has also instituted the Caribbean Examinations Council’s first annual CAPE Prize in History, as well as the pilot anti-teen-pregnancy project, Baby Think It Over, in two Trinidad and Tobago schools. Through all these endeavors, the EWMC’s goal is nothing less than the institutionalization of a nation’s historical memory—not an inconsiderable feat in the developing world, given the scant attention routinely paid to it. Our mission therefore gives life and meaning to Eric Williams’s words: “History [is] not a record of battles and

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politicians, dates and events or even of the follies and foibles of mankind, but rather a record of the development of humanity—of life and of society, in all their various manifestations.” The Eric Williams Memorial Collection is committed to preserving just that. By using the EWMC as a core around which to encourage and promote academic integrity, analysis, and argument, the world can continue to learn and benefit from the rich cultural heritage and history of the West Indies and its champions. until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will continue to be about the hunter. —african Proverb

Erica Williams Connell May 2013

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acknoWLedgmenTs This book began as separate papers given at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Conference, February 15– 16, 2002, on the legacy of the historian and politician Eric Williams. The conference presenters and coordinators acknowledged the magnitude of the event and agreed that we should amass a more lasting symbol of Eric Williams’s legacy. Thus this compendium was born. This project also began with the tireless energy of William (Sandy) Darity Jr., who included Tomeiko Ashford Carter and me on the project. Both Sandy and Tomeiko had other commitments that made the long, arduous road of this project unsustainable for them. However, without them the project could not and would not have moved forward, and in recognition of their hard work, I continue to use “we” in these acknowledgments. I would especially like to thank Cezley Sampson, executor of Rex Nettleford’s estate, for his assistance in making sure Professor Nettleford’s piece is part of this volume. Furthermore, we would not have realized this volume without the contributions of many of the presenters anthologized here and the help of many institutions and researchers. For infrastructural and financial support, special thanks goes to the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, and the Institute of African American Research (IAAR) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality (RNREI) at Duke University. Some very special office assistants at IAAR performed important tasks to help bring the book together: Alysa Campbell, Parfait Gasana, Citeria McCaleb, and Natalia Moore. We would also like to thank Charlene Chester at IAAR, who provided copyediting services; Rachel Morris at IAAR and Jackie Terrell at RNREI, both of whom offered timely business management; Carole Boyce Davies, professor of African New World studies at Florida International University, for her bibliographic help; and especially Erica Williams Connell for her encouragement and for keeping her father’s memory and accomplishments alive. xiii

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The Legacy of eric WiLLiams

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inTroducTion Tomeiko ashford carTer, Tanya L. shieLds, and WiLLiam dariTy Jr.

The Caribbean is the site of numerous gestures toward the creation of postcolonial spaces of belonging. Caribbean nation-states, still newly liberated from dominant patriarchies,1 are redefining their national and global identities apart from and in relation to the empires to which they belonged. To a large extent, the leaders of these nations build on inherited sociopolitical structures with no erasure of the colonial rule that previously existed, in effect negating a tabula rasa for the complete reconstruction of their countries. Caribbean-born scholars and artists have been helping their respective nations to formulate new identities that more closely reflect their countries’ national characters. The Cameroonian Achille Mbembe has long examined the mechanisms of power propelling postindependence legacies. According to Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony, state regulations of human behavior following direct rule, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, require continued “relations of subjection.” The prior colonizing state’s various manifestations of power continue “to enhance its value, distribute the product of labor, and either ensure abundance or manage poverty and scarcity.”2 Mbembe also asserts that current African national regimes suffer from governments that are ill-formed mixtures of native traditions and extant colonial practices.3 Mbembe’s characterization of the postcolonial state is one deeply informed by colonial legacies, ideologies, and violences and one whose earlier sensibility of social change has given way to a complicated mix of change and repression. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins highlight Caribbean-born citizens’ moves beyond colonial histories as crucial to establishing new postcolonial identities. In Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, Gilbert and Tompkins note that serious practitioners of postcolonialism “respond to more than . . . just the . . . experience of imperialism.”4 These practitioners seek a deeper understanding of their unique heritage. From José Martí’s articulation of “Our America” to Wilson Harris’s take on “indigeneity,” 3

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Caribbean intellectuals have extended themselves and their talents to create viable postcolonial moments to shrug off the violence of Europe’s colonial enterprises with radicalism and mimicry, offering, at times, quirky fusions of the two.5 Like Gilbert and Tompkins and serious Caribbean intellectuals, we examine the effects of nations’ recent eschewing of imperialism (the post-colonial), along with their postmodern and contemporary global participation (the postcolonial).6 At these intellectual, nationalistic, and social crossroads, we find Dr. Eric Williams, a scholar, leader, and driving force—a central architect of the postcolonial Caribbean self. In this volume, Williams is examined from several angles: as a political trailblazer, a charismatic personality, the embodiment of a nation’s aspirations, a social enthusiast, and a complicated man of genius. These depictions illustrate the varied dimensions of both the man and his homeland, the place where Williams, in the evocative words of Booker T. Washington, “let down [his] bucket” in the British West Indies.7 As a hyphenated descriptor, the term post-colonial refers to a country that has recently gained independence from an imperial nation-state, and it implies all the tribulations faced by a newly founded country emerging from under an oppressive power. As each of the Caribbean nations sought out and achieved independence, their unique stories unfolded. Trinidad and Tobago’s story is one of an ethnically diverse society perhaps best known for its contributions to the world’s musical heritage, namely, calypso, the invention of the steelpan, and one of the most extravagant celebrations of the preLenten festival of Carnival. But the country’s history is as complex as its contemporary multicultural reality. Caribs and Arawaks from South America first populated Trinidad as early as 2100 BC and, over the centuries, were joined by slaves, indentured servants, and émigrés from all parts of the world. In 1498, Christopher Columbus claimed Trinidad as part of Spain’s empire, and the ensuing years saw Spanish encomenderos enslave the indigenous people in exchange for their Christian conversion and protection, resulting in mission outposts throughout the island and a booming slave-driven economy. However, Trinidad and Tobago remained a Spanish “outback”—underdeveloped and underpopulated—until the crown issued its Cedula of Population in 1783. The Cedula granted acreage to Roman Catholic planters willing to emigrate to the islands, with grants based on the number of family members and slaves they brought with them. Remarkably, the law also provided smaller parcels to gens de couleur libre, or free men of color, most of whom came from French colonies. Thus Trinidad held within its shores a unique Frenchspeaking, free-black, slave-owning class.8 Meanwhile Tobago followed a very

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different trajectory: in a territory alternately claimed by the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch, slave revolts flourished, the most of notorious of which, in 1801, involved two hundred revolting slaves from sixteen plantations and saw six of their leaders burned alive. In the following year, Tobago was enfolded into the British crown, four years after it wrested Trinidad from Spanish rule. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was not fully realized through emancipation until 1838, and this spurred a dramatic demographic change among the islands’ labor population. The wage demands of newly freed black slaves led Britain to import more than 100,000 indentured laborers from Southeast Asia from 1845 to 1917 to maintain control over the international appetite for tobacco, cacao, cotton, and King Sugar. This kali pani, or “crossing the dark waters,” from India led to the much-vaunted characterization of Trinidad and Tobago as a place of two tribes—one Indian and one African— with minority populations of Chinese, Syrians, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, all under the rule of the British crown. Then the discovery of oil on Trinidadian lands greatly transformed the country by 1910. Now no longer solely an agricultural economy, the island nation underwent industrial and economic changes that impressed themselves on the existing racial stratification, adding to Trinidad’s historical trend of rebellion, riots, and strikes.9 Eric Williams was born into this atmosphere of diversity and social unrest in 1911. His young life was steered politically and socially by British authority and ideals. As the son of a postal official and the eldest of twelve children, he knew well the life of working-class West Indians, knowledge that would later allow him to identify with the plight of economically disenfranchised Trinbagonians at the height of his political career. His schooling was modeled on the British didactic system and saw little—if any—inclusion of Trinidad’s own historical and cultural heritage. Politically, he bore witness to the British crown’s 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement with the United States, which installed a military base on Trinidad’s northwest shores, thus triangulating Trinidadian interests with America’s maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and Britain’s wartime needs to subvert German U-boats and maintain access to much-needed energy reserves. As Bridget Brereton explains, the agreement turned the Caribbean into America’s backyard: “Trinidad played an important role in the war: it was the convoy assembly point for the dispatch of tankers from the Caribbean ports across the Atlantic to North Africa and Europe. [Furthermore,] the Gulf of Paria was used by US carriers and airplanes for their final exercises before going to the Pacific battleground via the Panama Canal.”10

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The Legislative Council of Trinidad comprised just thirteen members, six of whom were appointed by the governor, the remaining seven elected according to minimum age, property, and income standards. Not surprisingly, no native Trinbagonian held elected office within the Legislative Council until full adult suffrage was achieved in 1946 through the revolutionary actions of men such as labor leader Uriah Butler and what Rex Nettleford explains as the “important vehicle for serious dialogue between the citizenry and the wider society”: calypso (see chap. 1). It was from this resonant context that Williams embarked on his journey of leading the citizenry of Trinidad and Tobago out of colonialism and into, arguably, its present-day post-colonial independent identity. He was a remarkable student in his youth and, in 1932, won the prestigious Island Scholarship to Oxford University. Abroad he thrived academically, earning an honors degree in history in three years’ time and a PhD three years after that. Yet he brought with him his justifiable disenchantment as a black colonial and was persistently engaged in studying Trinidad’s racial, economic, and sociopolitical situations, perhaps then seen more clearly from the sterile distance of the empire’s homeland. His doctoral thesis, “The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery,” effectively attacked the benevolent notion that the abolition of the British slave trade was a humanitarian decision and asserted that it was instead a purely economic one.11 Despite his academic esteem, Williams could not find a teaching position in Britain, so he accepted a social sciences professorship at the historically black college Howard University in the United States. It was here that he published Capitalism and Slavery (1944), a treatise that built on his Oxford thesis. In a 2008 article in the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, William Darity Jr. notes that Capitalism and Slavery argued that, through the enslavement of Africans, the imperial agendas of the English and French had a far-reaching demographic, economic, and political impact on the West Indies. According to Darity, Williams not only located the origins of racism against blacks of African descent at the start of the Atlantic slave trade but also argued that colonial slavocracies in the West Indies, through the wealth and labor they produced, ushered Europe into the industrial age. Moreover, Williams contended that the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was primarily due to the colonies’ diminished economic value to the imperial center. In Williams’s view, the British ended slavery when it was no longer financially valuable for them, not because they had any high moral imperative to do so.12

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Perhaps the catharsis of finally publishing Capitalism and Slavery, or perhaps due to his discomfort with speaking to the inherently different sociopolitical problems of African Americans, Williams returned to Trinidad eight years after arriving in the United States and just two years after gaining tenure at Howard University. This homecoming was not surprising and would later prove prodigal. Lisa Clayton Robinson contends that Williams’s 1948 return to Trinidad as the deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission was short-lived. The council was a conservative organization, aimed at soliciting US and British neutral involvement in the Caribbean, and Williams wished for a more aggressive political activism. In 1955 he helped form the People’s National Movement (PNM), a political party espousing national unity through multiclass and multiracial representation, although its makeup consisted mainly of blacks. Despite discrepancies in party platform and composition, PNM leaders recognized greater disparities in Trinidad’s national leadership and its lay populace: the minority of wealth-owning whites governed a majority population of diverse ethnic peoples, among them Africans, East Indians, and Chinese. With Williams at the helm, the PNM called for radical government change: the party wanted a self-governing state. The PNM’s growing popularity paralleled Williams’s own ascent to political power. Winning the national election in 1956, the PNM gained majority legislative representation, and Williams was named chief minister, serving in that office from 1956 to 1959; in 1959 he became the premier. Six years later, on August 31, 1962, Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence from Mother England, effectively making Williams prime minister, a title replacing premier to reflect the change in governance, and the father of the new nation. Williams delivered several famous lectures at the “University” of Woodford Square, an open-air public plaza where he would share political wisdom with his constituents, a place where Williams felt he could “reach the public.”13 A vast population, historically subservient in the roles that Spain, Great Britain, and the United States had bestowed on it, was now at once enlightened, knowledgeable, and armed with the right to vote. Williams’s intention to make the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago a wholly functioning entity after its rule by Great Britain reflected the primary aim of post-colonialism: to highlight the historical relations and political struggles of decolonized nations. Such was certainly the case with Trinidad and Tobago as Williams faced the problems of how to establish a viable system of government that would address the needs of all its people, how to

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make Trinidad and Tobago economically stable, and how to unify the lower and upper classes, as well as the diverse populations in the nation, thus giving the island nation its own identity. Still, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins argue that the understanding of post-colonialism in its most basic sense as “a temporal concept[,] meaning the time after colonisation has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state,” is oversimplified and neglects to address the far-reaching cultural, sociopolitical, and international struggles for recognition confronted by new states.14 As we discuss hereafter, postcolonialism in its unhyphenated form implies more substantial formations of national identities and has more deterministic political and sociocultural ramifications for nation-states attempting to carve out their own niches within global contexts. Charles Bressler puts it most succinctly, describing post-colonialism as “the period after the colonized societies or countries have become independent,” in contrast to postcolonialism, which refers to “all the characteristics of a society or culture from the time of colonization to the present moment.”15 Ania Loomba adds that “the prefix ‘post’ complicates matters because it implies an ‘aftermath’ in two senses—temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. . . . The second implication [is contested because] if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at the same time.”16 It was in the milieu of both the post-colonial and the postcolonial that Eric Williams became an iconic Caribbean figure. When he died in March 1981, Eric Williams had become one of the most respected—and most highly criticized—figures in Caribbean political history, especially in the independent nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams’s initial advocacy of governance by the citizenry in lieu of nearabsentee rule by British officials, his sympathy with the living conditions of the underclasses, and his embrace of vernacular culture won him instant approval of masses of voters. Members of all races and classes revered him, especially for his promotion of a “raceless” society in favor of national pride and affinity. However, by 1970, young proponents of the Black Power Movement rejected Williams’s seemingly optimistic political stance, alleging that his policies actually retarded the mobility of blacks and East Indians. The young militants criticized what they saw as a lack of radicalism in his politics.

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Indeed, in 1970, Williams published his scathing history of the Caribbean, From Columbus to Castro, despite his seemingly lackluster political actions. This work extended the scope of Capitalism and Slavery to include the entire Caribbean. Amid charges that larger national powers easily influenced his political decisions, Williams seized more authority in response to the influence of the Black Power Movement. The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago was controversial in part because most people did not understand the need for black power when governance has a black face. Jerome Teelucksingh characterizes black power in the Caribbean as a response to racism and the deleterious “socioeconomic impacts of colonialism and imperialism.”17 In fact, “a 1970 study showed that in companies of 100 or more people: whites represented 53% of the business elite; ‘off-whites’ represented 15 %, mixed-race 15%, Chinese 9%, Indians 9%, and Africans 4%.”18 These statistics, coupled with lack of access to the nation’s prosperity in terms of jobs, housing, and health care, “led to protests that lasted months and ended with a state of emergency, the incarceration of over 70 movement leaders and the death of several others including Basil Davis.”19 Beverly Jones, a member of National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF), an organization that believed in armed resistance, was another victim of the Black Power rebellion. Though unarmed at the time, Jones was gunned down in 1973. The Black Power Movement revealed critical fissures in the postcolonial state. Fragile alliances between women, Indians, workingclass people, and intellectuals politicized these constituencies and galvanized action across the country.20 Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power Movement was part of regional and global movements for redressing colonial and postcolonial violence and inequality and ranged from the Cuban Revolution (1959), to the Black Power Movement in the United States, to independence struggles throughout Asia and Africa.21 Caribbean intellectuals, among them C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney, were part of this movement in England to Jamaica. In 1968, Rodney was banned from returning to Jamaica because he argued that “Caribbean poverty was a direct result of continued White control of banking, industry, commerce, and transportation and that without Black ownership, imperialism would persist even after independence.”22 The confluence of these global and local currents erupted in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970 and challenged Eric Williams’s grip on power. Brian Meeks characterizes it thus: “In February 1970 in the wake of carnival . . . tens of thousands of overwhelmingly young people marched daily in the streets of Port of Spain, San Fernando and other towns under the slogans of black solidarity, African-Indian unity, and an end to white and foreign domination of

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the country’s economy.”23 The situation intensified in April 1970 when Prime Minister Eric Williams declared a state of emergency and ordered the arrest of leaders of the movement, and called on the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment to leave its barracks in Chaguaramas on the western outskirts of the capital and enforce the law. But the revolutionary mood had run much deeper than Williams and his government had anticipated. Led by young lieutenants, a large contingent of the regiment mutinied. In an action interpreted in various ways, but that was ultimately defensive, the junior officers who led the mutiny refused to carry out the instructions of the government to enforce the decree. After a prolonged negotiation, doubtless spurred on, in part, by the imminent and visible threat of Venezuelan and U.S. warships on the horizon, the rebels surrendered, the government re-established its authority and the active, offensive phase of the “February Revolution” appeared to have been broken.24 The ideology of Black Power in Trinidad was similar to its expressions elsewhere, particularly in terms of gender and political power. There was an emphasis on “the black man’s” oppression and an ideology that “equated lack of power with lack of manhood.” The concept of manhood was directly linked to imperial notions of masculinity. In Making Men (1999), Belinda Edmondson argues that Caribbean intellectuals were writing themselves into and as the “English vision of intellectual authority” worthy of self government.25 In this realm of hegemonic gender expressions is the issue of power over another. For instance, the British or imperial model of masculinity was power over others (expressed in physical and emotional violence), neatly dressed, well-spoken, notion of manners, decorum, civility, and control of emotions.26 And though women were part of the movement, their participation was characterized in nurturing terms as the “Earth Mother who supported the Black Man in his struggle as head of household.”27 These expressions of masculinity did not challenge the inherited colonial norms, and the strong leader ideal persisted in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago.28 By the early 1980s, public opinion was divided over the effectiveness of Williams’s leadership.29 That divided reaction was due in part to Williams’s own enigmatic political persona, according to Gordon Rohlehr, an “ambiguous blend of conqueror, deliverer, benevolent patriarch, godfather, patron, sinister autocrat, and reincarnated colonial governor.”30 In his essay in this volume, Rex Nettleford asserts that Williams constructed a densely

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authoritarian image for himself. Nettleford goes so far as to say that Williams donned sunglasses to perpetuate this image, to hide his eyes and appear more distant and ominous. It is important to note, however, that while many critics may have felt Williams was rigid in his leadership style, he by no means terrorized Trinidad and Tobago or posed as a solitary national dictator. Still, Williams courageously headed one of the Caribbean’s first independent colonies—one with inherited colonial models of leadership—and catapulted Trinidad and Tobago onto the international stage.31 His efforts clearly anticipated the political aims and distresses of post-colonialism and globalization. Growing problems under his leadership of the fledgling nation indicated the complexities of creating a new identity for a former colony of the British empire, especially since Trinidad and Tobago still formally aligned itself with the mother country as a member of its commonwealth. This alignment illuminated the underlying practical and theoretical issues that often accompany post-colonial status. In fact, Williams grappled with maintaining Trinidad and Tobago’s position in a global context. At first eschewing help from world superpowers, then later collaborating with them, Williams sought to establish a sound and sustainable way of life for his citizens. His commitment to the stability of his country in an ever-changing, modern world recalls the aims of the second postcolonialism school of thought, what Gilbert and Tompkins define as “an engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies” in sharp contrast to the seemingly trite “chronological construction[s] of post-independence.”32 David Scott takes the argument further, asserting that postcolonial nations, given their recent though clearly viable histories, need to abandon their concern with the affairs of colonial powers and concentrate instead on the multiple yet distinctive political positions of new nation-states. To do this, Scott suggests that postcoloniality, as a theoretical set of assumptions, encourages healthy though critical “respect for pluralizations of subaltern difference.”33 Clearly Williams’s political strategies reflected a mind-set that recognized Trinidad and Tobago and nations like it as major national players on the international scene whose significance could no longer be ignored by traditional superpowers. As previously mentioned, in the context of this anthology, postcolonialism in its unhyphenated and sometimes collapsed status is also meaningful as a metaphor for a mind-set of inclusion and diversity, one that maintains that newly liberated countries throughout the world must regularly adopt socially responsive attitudes and practices given an increasingly interdependent

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world. In this sense, postcolonialism reflects a constant condition of being affected by a new world order. For Williams, such a postmodern concept of nation building meant continuously trying to address issues surrounding the diversity of his country’s populations while trying to carve out a unique niche for the nation itself, that is, to make a recognizable place for it on the world map. For most of his time in office, Williams achieved these goals and had the backing of his citizens in doing so. But the nation’s growing political unrest toward the end of his nearly twenty-five-year premiership and its ongoing strife between the races parallel situations of other post-colonial nations; consider Jamaica and India, two nations that have struggled to maintain a consistent postcolonial presence on modern global fronts.34 Williams’s problems with nation building and identity formation perhaps stemmed from his and his constituents’ varied concepts of citizenship, a defining marker, as many theorists argue, of the post-colonial subject. Homi Bhabha’s notion of “unhomeliness” certainly highlights the angst of generations of dispossessed Africans, East Indians, and Chinese who make up Trinidad and Tobago’s population and invariably seek to make the island nation home. The term unhomeliness describes the state of displaced cultural existence, connoting a particular dislocating aspect of that identity. As Bhabha defines the term more specifically, it “is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.”35 The psychological disruption inherent in multiple identifications, like those incurred by the post-colonial Caribbean citizen, makes reconciling such extracultural positionings challenging, to say the least. Contemporary Caribbean citizenship extends beyond T. H. Marshall’s civic-political definition of (1) “rights to property, personal liberty, and justice”; (2) “right[s] to participate in the exercise of political power”; and (3) “rights of economic and social security.”36 It includes more broadly what David Held describes as “the involvement of people in the community in which they live.”37 But postcolonial Caribbean citizenship considers the places in which individuals live, that is, their communities, to be local, national, regional, and international sites. Indeed, this multifaceted sense of place and being makes for a complicated postmodern ontology. Thus Williams’s difficulties in unifying his citizenry foreshadowed the ongoing struggles that characterize this period in world history. The long postcolonial moment (so considered because the temporal space of the moment could conceivably last indefinitely) is rife with questions of citizenship, possession, belonging, and identity: post-colonial histories ground, structure,

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and legitimize national spaces. In this instance—the actual moment of the early twenty-first century—this type of grounding is a complicated undertaking in which Caribbean territories struggle with poverty, ethnic violence, religious fundamentalism, cleavages between the left and right, and other sectarian and communal divisions. Certainly the present-day sociopolitical status of Trinidad and Tobago, like that of nations with similar histories, reflects its continuous mission to define itself in opposition to long-held imperialist notions of the nation and its people as different, lesser, and what Edward Said first termed “the Other.”38 Trinidad and Tobago is making positive strides in establishing its self-sufficiency, promoting its participation in the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and attempts in recent years to qualify for a place in the competition, building a metropolitan rail system running from Curepe to Port-ofSpain, premiering a homegrown brew on the world beer market, starting a new national airline, and revising some of its banking laws.39 Despite recent obstacles to stabilize its political and economic systems, Trinidad and Tobago is seeking to fulfill Williams’s vision of a self-defined, self-governing state. Further exploring Williams’s vision, we reproduce a set of conference papers and scholarly treatises on his personal history and legacy in this anthology. Held on February 15–16, 2002, at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the conference showcased scholarship on Williams’s life, writings, and political work. Conveners provided in-depth examinations of his political trials and accomplishments with a keen eye toward present-day Trinidad and Tobago, its positioning as a postcolonial/postcolonial nation, and Williams’s impact on the nation’s affairs. The papers have been revised and updated subsequently to take into account newly available information. This collection, divided into three parts (“Becoming Eric Williams,” “Political Williams,” and “Textual Williams”), foregrounds knowledge produced by Caribbean and pan-African scholars for application in post-colonial spaces. Although theories of governance, political science, and economics born elsewhere are necessary to understanding the postcolonial moment, here the Caribbean theorizes about itself to posit meaningful analyses of postindependence and twenty-first-century experiences. We include here a wave of scholars who, like Williams once did, analyze the Caribbean’s economic, political, and artistic status. In fact, many of our contributors are of Caribbean descent, since it was imperative to represent the views of scholars who were born in and/or live in the region. It was just

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as important to include other renowned scholars who do work on the region but may not have been born there; yet all our contributors share common research interests about the Caribbean. These essays examine the complexities of Williams’s personal and political lives and illuminate the contradictions of Caribbean post-/postcoloniality. Part 1 provides background on Williams and the Caribbean’s ontological quest, addressing what it means to be West Indian and Caribbean. Part 2 details the impact of Williams’s political policies on several areas: integration, color stratification, and labor and public-sector reform. Williams’s farreaching political influence in these areas concretizes his legacy. In part 3, critics address Williams’s scholarly work in print; here all our contributors recognize Williams’s long-heralded international reputation. Becoming eric WiLLiams

Former chancellor of the University of the West Indies Rex Nettleford gave the opening address at the Schomburg conference and set the tone for what should be our focus in studying Eric Williams: his personal, political, and intellectual legacy. In this keynote address, which forms the basis for the essay here, “Eric Williams: The Legacy Continues,” Nettleford dismisses notions of Williams as a completely self-absorbed leader, noting his lifelong reliance on the love of his daughter Erica and his identification with the struggles of his nation’s citizenry, the Trinbagonians. Citing Gordon Rohlehr, Nettleford praises Williams’s recognition of Carnival and calypso as significant affirming art forms that dually express the social aims of a single people. As Nettleford asserts, Williams himself became the object of the calypsonians’ attention.40 Nettleford further reveals that Trinbagonians revered Williams as their consummate patriarch and “savior,” though, as noted earlier, a younger, post-1970s generation ridiculed him for not being “pro-black.” A centralizing concept in this essay is Nettleford’s grounding of Williams’s legacy in terms of his “inward hunger,” that is, his self-reflections; his “pragmatic governance in the messianic atmosphere of Caribbean politics”; and, primarily, his ability to disseminate facts of history and economics to citizens as if he were sharing local folk talk or gossip. Nettleford rightly positions Williams as a complicated leader who sought to manage social conflict. Nettleford’s essay, while laying the groundwork for understanding the other essays and Williams’s legacy, also raises the question of who carries on these traditions today. Nettleford notes that the costs of depending on

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messianic leadership are simply too great. Nettleford addresses the tensions between Williams as father/messiah versus facilitator/enabler, especially in a “multi-ethnic polity . . . with diverse interests and polyglot aspirations.” He suggests that using knowledge as a key to emancipation was a critical lesson for Williams. Maurice St. Pierre’s essay “Eric Williams: The Making of a West Indian Intellectual” examines collective political practice, once characterized in superstitious terms, and Williams’s participation in the movement toward greater independence in midcentury Caribbean history. St. Pierre’s recounting of Williams’s biography grounds his analysis in several theoretical frameworks, such as the analysis of social movements and resource mobilization, to examine the role of “the intellectual” in social transformation. St. Pierre argues that social movements are epistemological spaces and that Williams’s participation in political independence makes him a historical architect of the intellectual movement. PoLiTicaL WiLLiams

In “‘We Integrate or We Perish’: Eric Williams, Forbes Burnham, and the Regional Integration Movement,” Cecilia McAlmont provides a comparative historical background on two Anglophone Caribbean leaders who were, at times, united by the dream of regional integration. McAlmont’s chapter is a timely exploration of Williams’s integration legacy, given the Caribbean’s postemancipatory reformation of its nations. According to McAlmont, Williams’s integration legacy is constructed around three issues: jealousy, contradiction, and child neglect. These tropes effectively portray how and why Caribbean nations consistently overlook their common interests. As an example of such oversight, McAlmont juxtaposes two “contrasting personalities [who] were fashioned in the same clay of a British elitist education”: Williams and Burnham. Parallel with Nettleford’s discussion of Williams’s role in forming a particular “Caribbean personality,” McAlmont likewise argues that the move toward integration was a way of severing the nations’ psychological enthrallment with colonialism. However, she notes that a central contradiction for both Williams and Burnham was their desire to break colonial bonds even as they celebrated the educational benefits that British colonialism had afforded them. McAlmont’s recognition of this contradiction—how these leaders tried to dismantle the master’s house with his own tools—is significant for anyone

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examining and hoping to learn from these legacies. Here again, the paradox of the simultaneous destruction of and borrowing from colonialism to foster the creation of “Caribbeanness” is played out in Williams’s and Burnham’s attitudes toward integration. McAlmont characterizes the West Indian Federation as a handicapped child requiring exceptional attention. Although Williams saw integration as a flawed process, he felt that integration, at least, would be a break in the psychological chain of mental slavery, however flawed, as well as a remedy to the fragmentation fostered by colonial trade and economic policy. Sharon Alexander-Gooding’s essay “Eric Williams: Protagonist or Antagonist of Caribbean Integration?” examines Williams’s role in promoting the regional integration movement in the Caribbean, in which the nations would unite under one federation. Alexander-Gooding argues that Williams’s efforts to ensure a smooth blend of the nations reflected his political stance that the West Indies should have one cohesive economic and political identity. However, she notes that Williams’s opponents felt his political behavior, such as his disagreements about representation in the federation and other controversial matters, demonstrated otherwise. In effect, some critics blame Williams for the disintegration of the union. Alexander-Gooding carefully analyzes other integrative initiatives in the Caribbean, as well as the views of two of Williams’s most intense opponents, C. L. R. James and Arthur Lewis. She also claims that Williams was one of the federation’s strongest advocates, a point perhaps corroborated by his early efforts at globalization: making the islands major contributors to the world economy while establishing a regional, post-colonial identity for the nation-states; establishing the University of the West Indies; and encouraging the teaching of Caribbean studies in collegiate and secondary school curriculums. She charges that Williams’s legacy is the true measure of his political worth throughout the region. In “Eric Williams and Color Stratification in the Caribbean,” William Darity Jr. explores the prevalence of color bias and economic disparity in present-day Caribbean nations by examining Williams’s analysis of the long historical presence of a “third class,” that is, a mixed race of individuals whose presence visibly attested to the power divide between planter whites and enslaved blacks. Analyzing Williams’s 1942 treatise The Negro in the Caribbean, Darity finds present-day earning differentials and the disproportionately high location of whites in positions of authority to be the direct result of what

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Williams asserted as the assignment of individuals of African descent to the lowest level of the Caribbean economic pyramid. Darity notes that, for Williams, the rise of a mixed-raced strata (“coloreds”) was associated with these citizens having greater access to educational and economic resources, including eventual landownership and dominance in professional fields like medicine and law. Darity notes that Williams contended that a deep social chasm separated lower-class blacks from coloreds, the latter preferring to participate in Eurocentric cultural activities and to distinguish themselves as heirs to European heritage. Darity highlights Williams’s findings in The Negro in the Caribbean that West Indians associate social advantage with lighter skin. While Darity acknowledges that Williams, in his previous study, identified the cause of widespread social cleavages in the Caribbean, he contends that Williams’s stance changed once he traded the role of professor for that of prime minister. Closely analyzing Williams’s policy on race as espoused in his speeches, Darity demonstrates that Williams adopted a “color-blind” political strategy and called for a national and singular West Indian identity, one that sought to unite the various Trinidadian ethnicities and discourage race pride. Certainly, Darity posits a conundrum between Williams’s roles first as historical analyst and subsequently as policy maker. This illuminates a broader political problem for the then recently “freed”/independent post-colonial states: how to unite and make sustainable countries whose variations in ethnic populations, labor histories, and economic and social gains require new approaches for the twenty-first century? Jerome Teelucksingh’s essay “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Eric Williams and the Labor Movement in Trinidad and Tobago, 1955–1981,” brings Williams to readers largely through his own words and makes a valuable addition to the larger collection. Teelucksingh chronicles Williams’s relationship with various unions in the Trinidadian political scene. Of great interest is Teelucksingh’s representation of Williams’s ability to pacify the working masses through the University of Woodford Square. In this space, Williams would express sympathy for working people and their issues while “emphasizing the urgency for social stability.” According to Teelucksingh, despite Williams’s work in the early 1950s with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, he managed to ascend to power in Trinidad by avoiding associations with unions, unlike most other leaders in the Anglophone Caribbean who received the mantle of national leadership after advocating for the greater populace from union platforms. Teelucksingh then highlights

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another significant aspect of Williams’s progressive stance on labor issues through his advocacy for gender equality in the labor force. In “Eric Williams and Public Service Reform,” Roland G. Baptiste evaluates Williams’s attempts to reorganize his administration’s main arms of civil duty, like those governing the employment practices of the police, teachers, and firefighters. Baptiste argues that though Williams attempted to refashion these departments over the three decades of his reign, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with their inefficiency and unwieldiness owing to their rapid growth in size. As Baptiste notes, Williams’s idealistic goal of ending governmental “favoritism and discrimination” against West Indians in the 1960s led to his party’s emphasis in the mid-1970s on state- and public-sector-controlled government to offset foreign involvement in the economy. This eventually led Williams to outsource work to other agencies and warn against governmental overspending. Baptiste astutely reviews Williams’s service legislation and cabinet speeches during these decades, offering a cautionary tale to contemporary Trinbagonian officials who employ “new” postcolonial efforts to streamline their offices of public administration and favor business management approaches to running their government. TexTuaL WiLLiams

In “Inward Hunger: How Eric Williams Fails Postcolonial History,” Grant Farred posits that Williams’s failure at Chaguaramas, Trinidad, in 1975 can be read both literally and metaphorically. To Farred, this site marked a “triple failure” because it was at this moment “that federalist dreams were destroyed, protonationalist sovereignty [was] negotiated and compromised, [and] postcolonial history was unaccounted and silenced.” Continuing this critique, Farred compares elements of Williams’s autobiography, Inward Hunger, with what he believes postcolonial history should do. Farred’s questioning of the autobiography certainly falls within the bounds of postmodern inquiry, where genres blur and understandings of the past shift. Farred notes the tensions between Williams as historian-scholar and as “First Citizen,” or “Citizen Maximus,” of an emergent postindependent nation. Dale Tomich’s exploration of Capitalism and Slavery, one of Williams’s scholarly contributions to Caribbean and post-colonial historiography and political economy, is an engagement with the book and its critics. In “Capitalism and Slavery Revisited: Remaking the Slave Commodity Frontier,”

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Tomich analyzes the historical and textual methodologies used by Williams, noting the unique ways in which he revealed the past through prose. Tomich provides an extensive examination of Capitalism and Slavery and its academic critics, allowing readers to get a sense of the text’s wide-ranging contribution. Finally, in the afterword, David Hinds contextualizes Williams’s leadership as a part of the “independence generation” that arose as a result of post– World War II Anglophone Caribbean independence movements across the region. But Hinds also seeks to dissect the complexities of Williams himself, both as an astute scholar whose ideologies put him on the pulse of political sentiment and as a complex political leader whose struggle to unify his country often put him at odds with his constituents. Hinds surmises that, in the end, Williams’s desire to reform the country, which forced him to err on the side of conservatism, won out over his struggles to resolve intranational multiethnic conflict, to completely stabilize and make responsive Trinidad’s political and economic systems, and to redefine fully the identity of his fledgling post-colonial state. All the essays here pay tribute to Eric Williams’s genius. By taking an objective look at Williams’s trials and triumphs, our contributors employ analytical lenses that use history to inform the present. Ultimately, though, it is the current post-/postcolonial moment that shapes representations of the Caribbean self, revealing primarily how the peoples of the Caribbean understand and define themselves. noTes 1. Our use of the term “patriarchy” here by no means suggests that we do not recognize some female leaders’ roles in colonization. However, the term implies that many males have dominated positions of power and have been the primary agents of colonization. While there are historical exceptions to male rule and male-led imperialism (Isabella, queen regnant of Castille and Leon [1474–1504], and Queen Victoria of England [1837–1901]), many female leaders have done little to push agendas of domination during their terms of power. Still, some female leaders who have had progressive agendas (e.g., Janet Jagan, president of Guyana [term: December 19, 1997, to August 11, 1999], previously prime minister of Guyana [term: March 17, 1997, to December 19, 1997]; and Portia Simpson-Miller, prime minister of Jamaica [term 1: March 30, 2006, to September 11, 2007; term 2: January 5, 2012, to the present]) have not made extreme changes to the political systems in which they have operated. Moreover, some other female leaders governed rigidly to strictly enforce their political stances and to be as respected as their male peers (e.g., the “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the

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United Kingdom [term: 1979–1990] and the Leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party [term: 1975–1990]; and the “Iron Lady of the Caribbean,” Dame Eugenia Charles, prime minister of Dominica [term: July 21, 1980, to June 14, 1995], previously foreign minister of Dominica [term: 1980–1990]). Other female leaders ruled as their male predecessors did so as to perpetuate their own power via the political and economic systems they inherited. Therefore patriarchy represents a persistent posture or legacy of domination and rule primarily—but not solely—conducted by males, which may include, but is not limited to, the coopting of nations, political and economic resources, indigenous populations, cultures, and languages, and the altering of them to fit the mold of the imperial or acquiring power. 2. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 24. 3. Ibid., 24–25. 4. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama, 2. 5. Here we reference Derek Walcott’s article in which he asks whether it is prudent for post-colonial Caribbean nation-states to forfeit newly honed national identities for American political identity even in the wake of recent departures from British imperial rule. 6. See also Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 7. In 1895 Booker T. Washington delivered a famous speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. Called “Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are,” the speech is often dubbed “The Atlanta Compromise,” since Washington urged blacks and whites to work together instead of antagonistically striving against each other, and to realize their mutual economic and social worth instead of looking to peoples of foreign lands. Williams’s call to “let down my bucket” reiterates the sentiment of Washington’s speech. Williams borrows the phrase from Washington, using his variation in the speech “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943–1955,” given on June 21, 1955, at Woodford Square. For a complete reference, see Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 280. 8. The generous terms of the Cedula promised Roman Catholic planters thirty acres for each family member and fifteen acres for each slave. Free colored settlers “were entitled to [fifteen acres for each family member] and a proportionate grant for each slave.” The historian Bridget Brereton notes that the Cedula recognized the rights of citizenship for both whites and coloreds, indicating that “the Spanish government was prepared to grant free coloured property-owners fuller civil rights than they enjoyed anywhere else in the West Indies.” This policy was manifested by the increase of French planters to the islands, particularly in light of the Haitian Revolution and the end of slavery in French territories (Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 13). 9. Examples of these riots include the Belmanna riots, in which eighteen sugar workers protested the planters’ violation of the Mertaire System, under which workers took part in profit sharing rather than receiving wages; the Canboulay riots (1881 in Port of Spain and 1884 in Princess Town and San Fernando), which challenged British attempts to curtail the excesses of Carnival celebrations; the Hosay massacre of 1884 in San Fernando; and the labor riots in the 1930s that affected the entire region. 10. Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 191. 11. Williams’s dissertation is now available as a book, edited by Dale Tomich (Rowman and Littlefield, February 7, 2014).

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12. See William Darity Jr., “Capitalism and Slavery,” in Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, for a discussion of Britain’s motivation to pass the slave trade law. 13. Williams, Inward Hunger, 131. 14. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama, 2. 15. Bressler, Literary Criticism, 201. 16. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 12. 17. Teelucksingh, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago,” 158. 18. Pasley, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad,” 25. 19. West-Durán, African Caribbeans, 191. 20. Teelucksingh, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago,” 171–74. 21. Pasley, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad,” 25–26. 22. Teelucksingh, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago,” 162. 23. Meeks, Narratives of Resistance, 49. 24. Ibid., 50. 25. Edmondson, Making Men, 23–28. 26. Pasley, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad,” 35. 27. Ibid., 28. 28. See also Teelucksingh, “The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago.” 29. Robinson, “Trinidad and Tobago.” 30. Rohlehr, “The Culture of Williams,” 850. 31. Other models of leadership present in the Caribbean from which Williams may have drawn include inherited British and retained African leadership paradigms, which featured bureaucratic and communal forms of government. Williams was probably aware of the union organizing activities in Trinidad and Tobago that reached their height in 1937, although he was physically outside the Caribbean at the time, finishing his PhD at Oxford University. He likely compared his premiership to—and railed against—the leadership style of labor leader Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, who rallied on behalf of working-class oil workers and later became a politician. Williams’s political party, the People’s National Movement, and the Butler Home Rule Party would find themselves in a contest for votes and public approval in the late 1950s. For more on Williams’s criticism of Butler and Butler’s leadership style, see Rohlehr, “The Culture of Williams,” 866. See also Huches, “Adult Suffrage and the Party System in Trinidad,” 15–26. Williams also befriended and sought political counsel from the Caribbean economist William Arthur Lewis. Earning a PhD from the London School of Economics in 1940 and serving at various points as vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies and special adviser to the prime minister, Lewis hailed from the former British colony of Saint Lucia. In political arenas, Williams was obviously privy to Lewis’s perspective on labor economies in developing countries, including his take on blacks, labor, and the Caribbean. For an analysis of Lewis’s proposed governing models of “peasant-led agricultural development” and “political pluralism,” see Yoichi Mine, “The Political Element in the Works of W. Arthur Lewis,” 329–55; and for an examination of Lewis’s notion of dichotomized models of labor in developing economies, see Richard P. C. Brown, “On Labour Market Dualism in the Lewis Model,” 350–54.

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32. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama, 2. 33. Scott, Refashioning Futures, 224. 34. Jamaica claimed independence from the British Commonwealth on August 6, 1962. India, on the other hand, gained independence from Britain much earlier, on August 15, 1947. Jamaica’s and India’s post-colonial trials similarly include issues of poverty, unemployment, and generally lackluster economies. Jamaica’s economy now depends greatly on funds generated from tourist resorts, and India has found ways to boost its economic revenues by providing outsourced business services. Trinidad and Tobago has found some economic sustainability through the harvesting and marketing of oil. For a further analysis of the status of post-colonial nations like Jamaica, India, and Trinidad and Tobago, see Shohat, “Notes on the Post-Colonial,” 99–113. 35. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9. 36. T. H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” quoted in van Steenbergen, The Condition of Citizenship, 2. 37. Held, “Between State and Civil Society,” 20. 38. See Said, Culture and Imperialism. 39. In the last few years, Trinidad and Tobago has made great efforts to establish itself as a viable, economically stable nation. For example, its Soca Warriors national team has helped to attract more spectators to soccer (known outside the United States as football). The nation has also garnered attention for its strides in another national pastime: cricket. Construction of the new rail system will help connect disparate and isolated groups in the country, unifying the nation as a whole. The country is revitalizing production of Carib, a national beer brand that was created in the mid-twentieth century. The national government is supporting the genesis of the country’s own Caribbean Airlines, which will replace British West Indies Airlines. New laws governing the establishment of credit unions should help the economy prosper. Other national art and cultural attractions, like native literatures, calypso and steelpan music, and Carnival demonstrate the nation’s rich heritage and contribute to economic stability as well. 40. James M. Jones contextualizes calypso and Carnival in the following way: “Calypso music told the stories of the Trinidad people from year to year and the celebration of Carnival put these stories in a musical context, expressing themselves in humor, joy, and vibrant rhythms of color and movement. The Calypsonian emerged as the modern day griot, telling the tales of life in Trinidad and Tobago in rhythm and song.” See Jones, “A Psychological Theory of the African Legacy in American Culture,” 225.

Part i

Becoming eric WiLLiams

1.1 Eric Williams before his often adoring public. Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

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eric WiLLiams The Legacy continues rex neTTLeford

he was “a visionary leader” but he was also “zealous, high-minded, deeply religious, authoritarian, driven, unclubbable, difficult, battle-scarred, lonely, selfabsorbed, and inwardly tormented.” —david smith, “Leadership is a hard act to follow”

The above epigraph was written not about Eric Williams but about Lord John Reith of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).1 Reith, while bemoaning his fate in having been set apart from other men, said, “What a curse it is to have outstanding comprehensive ability and intelligence, combined with a desire to pursue them to the maximum purpose.”2 Williams did not quite say this about himself, but he would hardly have disagreed if asked whether this curse applied to him. His detractors would most certainly have agreed. Some, under the guise of objective scholarship, still find him a “flawed leader” who, “accustomed to success, . . . often fell apart if faced with failure.”3 No one can convince some students of Williams’s public career that he did not fall apart after Trinidad and Tobago’s 1970 “revolution,” which, in terms of his vision for a self-respecting, creatively constructive postcolonial polity, many consider to be the hallmark of failure. Some argue that typical driven leaders often leave their family, friends, and feelings behind in their pursuit of success, arguably as did Marcus Garvey and Mohandas Gandhi, though not in the tradition of other charismatic Caribbean leaders such as Norman Manley, who had the support of his wife Edna; and Cheddi Jagan, who worked alongside his wife Janet. Still, like Garvey, whose legacy was zealously and caringly guarded by his second wife, Amy Jacques, Eric Williams has his beloved daughter Erica to do the same.4 Typecasting Williams is therefore not easy, for his legacy suggests many facets of his personal and political personae. 25

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Despite the persistent legacy of Williams and his leadership in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago is now experiencing what appears to be a constitutional crisis, a fact that would probably not surprise Williams. He would be no less surprised by island citizens not allowing something as serious as a national crisis to interfere with Carnival, a national religious and recreational pastime.5 Dr. Williams himself had once entertained the thought of suspending, if not banning, this pre-Lenten festival, but part of his genius was realizing that such a blasphemous act would likely elicit his political demise. Admittedly, while the nation rejuvenated itself with Carnival, Williams used the time to do some “serious writing.” He was a reluctant retiree from formal academic work, though he was seen at a couple of “last lap” street marches.6 Williams allowed the Trinidadian impulse to take its course and permitted himself to see the deep cultural significance of this great arts festival, which, for all its seeming minstrelsy, was too much a mainstay of Caribbean identity and Trinidadian psychic stability to dismiss. He likewise did not overlook the musical contributions of the calypso tradition, which, according to Gordon Rohlehr, became an important vehicle for serious dialogue between the citizenry and the wider society, between Williams the governor and Trinbagonians the governed. The “political calypso,” as Rohlehr asserts, “emerged out of the background of conflict as a medium for articulating class struggle as well as a vehicle for transmitting images of self and potential, different from the images which had traditionally been transmitted by the prevailing order.”7 This immediately made the calypsonian balladeers kindred spirits of Eric Williams, the anticolonialist champion, freedom fighter, and head of the political movement, later designated “Doctor Politics” because of the unique individual stamp he placed on the movement.8 In the beginning, calypsonians like Atilla, Beginner, and the Mighty Sparrow were Williams’s true kindred spirits, decrying colonial obscenities such as sedition bills and censorship and lauding his embodiment of “benefactor, patron, reformer and builder.”9 After all, the loving and beloved godfather had brought roads, houses, and—above all—education to his surrogate children. All detractors were therefore regarded as ungrateful and unappreciative recipients of the benefactions of a kind and feeling “Father of the Nation.” Such was the preparatory period—or “Palm Sunday,” if you will—the celebration of Williams as the “redeemer” or “savior” of Trinidad and Tobago. But following this was the “Good Friday” phenomenon suffered by all postcolonial leaders in the messianic atmosphere bred by Caribbean politics: a political crucifixion. Unlike Christ, the savior who died and ascended to

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1.2 Single father Eric Williams with his daughter Erica. Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

heaven to save humankind from sin, Caribbean political messiahs were guaranteed neither resurrection nor ascension. Williams, Michael Manley, Alexander Bustamante, Eric Gairy, and Maurice Bishop understood the cynicism and distrust of authority that was so much a part of the Caribbean political scene. The Caribbean from which Williams hailed savaged its leaders without necessarily assassinating them, the brutal 1983 death of Grenada’s Maurice Bishop notwithstanding.10 Williams was to suffer attacks for his seemingly rigid authoritarianism, susceptibility to the flattery of sycophants, and vulnerability to blandishments and corruption—the very bo-bol (the Caribbean dialectal sensibility of fraud or questionable business dealings) that Williams had lambasted in the 1950s of big business. Much of this came from the likes of younger calypsonians like the Mighty Chalkdust (Hollis Urban Lester Liverpool), who himself became a “doctor”

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1.3 Eric Williams enjoying an evening of calypso. “I remember [calypso commentaries] from many, many years ago that criticized him in office—the best evidence possible that people took him seriously,” recalled Colin Powell, former U.S. secretary of state. Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

(of philosophy, that is). Williams was the target of many of Chalkdust’s calypso songs, especially after the 1970 uprising. Postcolonial degradation had set in and was seen by many of the younger generation as a comprehensive economic, mental, moral, and societal collapse, despite the oil boom of 1973, which admittedly came without much effort by the Trinidad administration. For some, the oil boom brought wealth, so those who did not like what was happening could indeed “get the hell out of here,” courtesy of Dr. Williams himself.11 Individuals in other parts of the Caribbean saw this as a characteristically Williamsonian (or Trinidadian) response to detractors, very much in the spirit of picong, the practice of verbal jousting with few holds barred. The Jamaicans have not forgotten Williams’s arithmetical quip when they dared to leave the federation: “One from ten leaves naught.”12 Nor have they forgotten his fulminations against Michael Manley, a man Williams once admired, when Manley attempted to forge an oil deal with Venezuela that Williams feared would lead to that country’s hegemony over the Caribbean. Years later, Williams’s perspective no doubt haunted the West Indies Commission,

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which, while fully supportive of his wider Caribbean vision, was conscious of the potential threat that the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the common trade market among seven Caribbean commonwealths, could be swamped by the larger allies.13 Chalkdust/Dr. Liverpool aspired to capture the alleged arrogance of Williams during those oil-drenched years through the lines “Tell Burnham and Manley [we] got oil / Let Barrow kiss me tail / oil don’t spoil.”14 Calypsonians would remain critical of Williams although it was he who reinforced the ideals of freedom of expression, hatred of injustice, and the underclass’s desire to redress past political and social wrongs. Williams concurred that this questionable history, begun in the crucible of the Atlantic through the slave trade then manifested on land through subsequent exploitations of labor under slavery, fueled Western capitalism. The irony was that Williams was now presiding over the present-day operation of that capitalism, a capitalism “gone mad,” in the words of Mighty Sparrow.15 Despite the conflict during these years over excessive wealth for the few and economic hardship for many, Williams spoke in the vernacular of his Trinidadian citizenry. He often did so while relying on an intellectual perspective as his basis. Viewing Williams in this light, Patricia Mohammed describes him as an enigmatic figure. Despite his reclusion, he “kept in touch with the popular culture of Carnival and calypso” but also displayed “the most esteemed characteristics of Trinidadian masculinity [since] he could out-talk and demolish his political opponents with ‘robber talk’ . . . and transfix crowds to stand and listen to him for hours” in his political consciousness-raising exercises.16 This was especially true at the University of Woodford Square, where he “made a point not to talk down to the people. It was university discourse in content and in form that was designed to place the problems of Trinidad in an international perspective.”17 This stately but personal involvement with Trinidad was the engagement of an oral master. The famed Caribbean writer George Lamming described Williams’s engagement thus: He turned history, the history of the Caribbean, into gossip, so that the story of a people’s predicament seemed no longer the infinite, barren tract of documents, dates, and texts. Everything became news; slavery, colonization, the forgivable deception of metropolitan rule, the sad and inevitable unawareness of native production. . . . His lectures retained always the character of whisper which everyone was allowed to hear, a rumor which experience had established as truth.18

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The paradox of Williams engaging in robber talk and double entendre has all the multilayered significations of the calypsonian craft. Williams was a great storyteller and griot in the garb of an eminent scholar. Despite his arguably high-minded solemnity, loneliness, and selfabsorption, he bowed to picong and to the “howdy, pardner!” culture of his extremely challenging but well-loved Trinidad. At least he understood, as Derek Walcott was to later say about Caribbean society, that the land over which he presided was “a wearying terrain,” exacting from all who dared try to conquer and to serve it great measures of self-sacrifice, as well as dispensing large doses of personal interrogation while demanding patience, understanding, great caring, and compassion. Williams understood this because he was a great teacher, one who dared to try to transform Trinidad and Tobago into one big classroom through his lectures at the University of Woodford Square, where he freely shared ideas about the plight of Trinidad and Tobago. There, on his own account, he accepted the people’s intellectual capacity to dissect pressing social issues. He spoke to them in dulcet tones about nationhood, self-respect, and the responsibility to find self and society out of the inherited psychic and material obscenities of the past. This boldly illustrates Williams’s power as an eloquent presence, as one of the region’s major nation builders and shapers of regional perspectives and social vision. Williams considered “his Caribbean” to be not simply the Anglophone Caribbean but all the lands bordered by the Caribbean Sea, from Puerto Rico to Cuba, from Santo Domingo to Haiti, from the tip of Florida to Guyana on mainland South America. This is the Caribbean envisioned in Williams’s 1970 history From Columbus to Castro,19 in which he lauded Fidel Castro’s struggle to retain the autonomy of Cuba as a Caribbean ideal yet viewed his embrace of advanced socialism as an alien creed.20 Indeed, Williams’s policies put to virtual shame the strident democratic socialist rhetoric of the Michael Manley administration in Jamaica during the mid-1970s.21 The legacy continues, if not in the microcosmic dimensions of the governance of Trinidad and Tobago, then in the broad vision of a country that Williams saw as an integral part of a regional—and global—tapestry. The Caribbean has continually found cause to situate itself in a world order that recognizes the country’s provincial attributes while strengthening its international ties. Williams’s fighting impulses would likely be active were he alive and flourishing in today’s age of globalization, for “like Capitalism and Socialism before it, globalization at present means great prosperity for the few and continuing inequality and poverty for the many.”22 The globalized media

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1.4 The University of Woodford Square, an outdoor park where Eric Williams delivered scores of lectures to tens of thousands of people, dubbed by him “university dishes served with political sauce.” Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

saturation of Caribbean consciousness would likely have stirred Williams against metropolitan cultural domination via the media and accentuated the need to raise or reraise the consciousness of his people to Caribbean cultural certitude and a sense of its history, an awareness he considered part of his own “inward hunger” to exist and mark his identity. Metaphorically, his spirit would have joined the fight of a new generation of Caribbean people to position Trinidad and Tobago as a viable nation-state on the global stage, even while he might have sat silent, meditative, and stern in the conference room.23 The persistence of racism in the Western world would no doubt have Williams maintaining that it was not the cause of slavery but rather the result of it. However, he would likely insist that racism is no less significant to the Caribbean region. That racism lives on in the region renders The Negro in the Caribbean (1942) acutely relevant, since the enduring bias in the Americas is still given to measuring status according to melanin, hair texture, nose structure, and lip thickness, despite the admittedly tremendous strides made by Caribbean people of African descent. How he would deal with the current reality of racial politics in his native Trinidad, where some races and ethnicities cling to essentialist claims of national rights and authority, is difficult to know. Could the Williams policy of ethnic containment last? He had an understanding of the plural character of

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his nation and had a dream of a harmonious society rooted in cultural diversity. At the launch of the People’s National Movement (PNM), he could say with seeming conviction: We are rather a rally, a convention of all and for all, a mobilisation of all forces in the community cutting across race and religion, class and color with emphasis on united action by all the people in the common cause.24 Like the hopes held by regional leaders before and after him, Williams’s highminded desire for unity among such diverse groups was dashed by the deep divisive social forces (whether racism or classism) that even he could not force to function in harmony. Despite Williams’s aforementioned arithmetic of Jamaica’s presence in the union, he continued his commitment to an integrated region that could meet the onslaughts of a hostile world, one that had targeted the Caribbean through exploitation, underdevelopment, and dehumanization for five centuries. In 1969, eight years after his “One from Ten” speech, Williams addressed the Fifth Meeting of the Heads of Government of the Commonwealth Caribbean: The most developed nations of the world are today grouping together for economic, social, and political reasons. If we, the present leaders of Government, fail our people of today, our children and those unborn will never forgive us. If we fail to bury petty differences and give and take in this whole exercise of regional co-operation, and if we fail to capitalise on our tremendous achievements during the past years, if we lose the grip of success which we achieved, we may never have the opportunity to do so again in our present lifetime.25 Many would say that this speech was prophetic for Williams himself. He died without experiencing the joy of the region resolving differences, benefiting sufficiently from past successes, or satisfying the political desires of a younger generation. He was to become the victim of something approaching armed resistance in 1970, only a year after his “One from Ten” declaration. And while even defenders of the present era would be tempted to remind Williams that the world has changed, others would be quick to blame him for indulging in the kind of political personalism denied to the very people

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he felt had the right to shape their own society. In particular, these people were denied the ability to build up capacities for reconciling conflicts. Yet still others would dismiss all of this as the jaundiced view of those who want Trinidad and Tobago to remain mired in unrelieved mediocrity, evading the rigors of “excellence” that Williams demanded not only of himself but of all in his “court.” His withdrawal from communication and pointed cold-shouldering made those who did not meet his approval duly aware of his displeasure. Admittedly this was a weakness, even a bit of self-indulgence on Williams’s part. But founding a new nation and challenging Western historical scholarship with a groundbreaking, controversy-inviting thesis were not “normal” feats. As Theodore Sealy of Jamaica’s ancestral Daily Gleaner once wrote, Dr. Williams may have been “a wizard who, as wizards are, [was] naturally held in awe, rarely held in affection, but held totally in respect.”26 One thing is certain: he could never be ignored. A distinguished Trinidadian scholar had this to say of Williams: [His] recognized competence as an effective political speaker and debater, his prodigious research ability, his capacity for organizing and synthesizing information, his capacity for sustained work, his academic reputation, his ability to manipulate men [and women] . . . as well as the fear, love, and respect which many had for him also added to the influence he was able to wield, [and] the fact that he was the founder of the ruling party and the head of government for two and half decades also helped to give him several increments of power.27 Many felt helpless and vulnerable in the face of such an awesome force. It is as though Trinidad slew the dragon of colonialism yet gave birth to a Colossus. No other contemporary leader commanded such awe among his “subjects,” not even Bustamante and Manley, who were popular, charismatic, brilliant, and astute, but electorally unreliable. It is purported that Williams at one time or another was rude to nearly all his contemporaries, including the federation’s first and only prime minister, Sir Grantley Adams—a blot, some still insist, on Williams’s reputation as a public leader.28 All of this notwithstanding, Williams’s life and work still have an impact on the Caribbean and much of the wider world. The lessons from his example are legendary. Marcus Garvey’s injunction in 1937 for black Canadians to “free themselves from mental bondage,” though uttered while Williams was

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still at university, resonated with much urgency.29 Williams grew to know, and soon demonstrated, that only the people of the Caribbean could emancipate themselves from the mental degradation that beset them as a consequence of slavery and the capitalist cosmology that slavery spawned. Williams insisted that one modality of redemption was mandatory exercise of creative intellect by people of African ancestry everywhere. For him, every human act was one of intelligence, one that demanded mastery over bodies of knowledge and could serve a people’s growth and development; this was the reason for living. One of Williams’s greatest legacies was propagating the idea that such bodies of knowledge had to be generated by oneself, ferreted out of one’s own history, tested against one’s own contemporary experiences, appropriately stored for timely retrieval in the conduct of one’s daily life, and later applied collectively to policy making. Williams would likely have recommended reliance on in-depth research and logical argument to persuade his people, rather than the use of oratory alone. The centrality of education in building social capital was indeed a part of his public policy profile; and though his strong views on the University of the West Indies remain controversial, they highlight his insistence that a regional university should consciously prepare graduates for the tasks of regional development. His successors in CARICOM were to declare this formally in Grenada with the Grand Anse Declaration of 1989.30 Another important lesson from Williams’s life and work was what he admittedly did not achieve in full for his native Trinidad and Tobago. He called for constitutional reform throughout the English-speaking Caribbean during the height of the Caribbean Black Power Movement in the early 1970s. While the efforts of this revolutionary movement were perhaps most overtly felt in Trinidad and Tobago, the Black Power ideology was certainly acknowledged across the often fragile political structures of other Caribbean nations. To discourage further social degeneration, Caribbean leaders were advised to proceed with caution while governing their citizenry at the time.31 There is no substitute for a strategic alliance between leaders and their governed populaces. The relationship between native leaders and Caribbean peoples is often demonstrable and tangible, optimistically replacing absentee rule of masters in a bygone plantation era and encouraging a more responsive rule by present-day leaders. As Williams himself put it, “Massa day done.”32 The Williams years provide many lessons about political leadership, governance, and the continuing struggle to exist in the postcolonial outposts of empire, whether the empire was British, Spanish, French, or Dutch.

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The Williams years also point to the work that must continue, that is, the understanding of the special place the Caribbean holds in the history of human development owing to Columbus’s accidental landfall in the region. Williams’s native Trinidad notwithstanding, nowhere is this concept more telling than in the Caribbean, where a culturally diverse aggregation of people have striven—with noticeable success—to live together rather than simply side by side. It is something that both Cuba and Dominican Republic have no doubt taken into consideration in their expressed desire to become part of the CARICOM family. Extremely far-reaching indeed are the potential implications for bringing an end to racism and the devastatingly persistent denigration of all things African in the Americas, for producing a society that values social justice on the basis of meritorious achievement rather than on the basis of class and skin shade, and for placing humans at the center of the cosmos. There is much in the scholarship, life, and work of Eric Williams that can offer a guide. Like all great leader-activists, Williams was as much a creature shaped by the challenges presented by Trinidad and the Caribbean as were Trinidad and the Caribbean molded by his vision, action, and self-torment. As Sealy said in his 1991 book Caribbean Leaders: I myself cannot forget the younger Williams in his early days, the cheerfulness of the person at that time, his ability to be pleasant to everyone—young people—and now to see from a distance the transition, the transmutation of that debonair person into the totally dedicated national leader. It is awe-inspiring but I still have affection for the man I first knew.33 Eric Williams remains enigmatic and is certainly one of the most fascinating people the Caribbean and the African diaspora has so far produced. His legacy, indeed, continues. noTes 1. David Smith, “Leadership Is a Hard Act to Follow,” 6, attributed to John Birt of the BBC on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary when describing Lord Reith, founder of the BBC. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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4. Edna Manley, Norman Manley’s wife, provided great support in his political campaign for self-government and independence for Jamaica. She was a sculptor and animator who brought her artistic sensibility to bear on the Jamaican political movement from 1938 to 1962 when Jamaica became independent. She was also the zealous guardian of her husband’s legacy after his death in 1967 and was instrumental in facilitating the publication by Longman Caribbean of Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches, edited by this author. Janet Jagan, wife of Cheddi Jagan, was his faithful partner in active politics and succeeded her husband as president of independent Guyana after his death in 1992, thus preserving his legacy of leftist politics during independence. Erica Williams Connell, daughter of Eric Williams, is the de facto literary executor of her father’s writings and a keen and active guardian of his legacy through the promotion of continuing study and analysis his scholarly works, political life, and influence on Caribbean postcolonial development. 5. This refers to the impasse that developed between the United National Congress (UNC) and the PNM after the December 8, 2001, general elections. The elections ended in a draw with each party winning eighteen seats. After an agreement by both party leaders to have the president name the prime minister, UNC leader Basdeo Panday refused to acknowledge that nominee, Patrick Manning, leader of the PNM. The impasse deepened when the parties refused to agree on a nominee for a Speaker of the House, thus rendering a meeting of Parliament impossible. Media discussions continued, but with little obvious anxiety to find a solution before the pre-Lenten Carnival (February 11–12). Carnival is a Trinidadian festival art of immense cultural significance to the general populace, to popular calypsonians and steelpan artists, and to the commercial business sector. 6. Williams, British Historians and the West Indies, 11. 7. Rohlehr, “Man Talking to Man,” 94. 8. The moniker “Doctor Politics” is attributed to Lloyd Best, political activist, economist, editor of the Trinidad and Tobago Review, and founder of the Tapia movement, to describe the authoritarian messianic politics of Dr. Eric Williams. See Ryan, “The Limits of Executive Power,” 65–81. 9. Ibid., 97. 10. With the assistance of the Grenadian army, communist Bernard Coard led a coup against the installed government of Grenada on October 19, 1983, and placed prime minister Maurice Bishop under house arrest. Bishop was eventually freed after widespread demonstrations of support, but when he resumed power, he and seven cabinet ministers were executed by the Coard regime, which then put the island under martial law. The overthrow of the moderate Bishop government greatly worried the United States, especially because the Grenadian military began building a large airstrip with the assistance of Cuban construction workers; US analysts were convinced this would be used for Soviet aircraft to refuel and unload weapons for sympathetic Caribbean and Central American rebels. On October 25, 1983, US forces stationed in Barbados invaded Grenada, supposedly at the request of certain Caribbean leaders, an act that was condemned not only by Trinidad and Tobago but also by Great Britain and the United Nations. Those responsible for Bishop’s execution, who would become known as the Grenada 17, were imprisoned, and a democratic, US-backed government was soon installed.

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11. The phrase attributed to Dr. Williams was made popular by the Mighty Sparrow in a calypso song and speaks to the mythical omnipotence of Williams. Ryan opens his article “The Limits of Executive Power” with the lines “When I say cometh you cometh and when I say goeth, you go / Who don’t like it can get the hell outta’ here” to illustrate the thenperceived omnipotence of Williams. 12. This was Williams’s response to the breakup of the West Indies Federation as a result of the Jamaican 1961 referendum outcome that signaled the withdrawal of Jamaica from the three-year-old federation of ten formerly British colonies. 13. See Time for Action: The Report of the West Indian Commission, 68, for the recommendation that “CARICOM’s relations with the wider Caribbean should not be restricted to membership of, or association with, CARICOM itself, which should be the core family of the Caribbean integration process.” 14. Rohlehr, “Man Talking to Man,” 100. 15. The Mighty Sparrow’s “Capitalism Gone Mad” reads in part: “You gotta’ be a millionaire / Or some kind o’petit / bourgeoisie. Anytime you / living here, in dis / country / You gotta’ be in / skullduggery / Making you money / illicitly / To live like somebody, in dis country / It’s outrageous and insane / Dem crazy prices in / Port-a-Spain. And / like de merchants / Going out dey brain / And de working man / Like he only toiling in vain / Wey you ever hear / A television cost / seven thousand Quarter / million for a lit’le / piece a land Eighty / Ninety thousand for a / motor car / At last here in Trinidad, we see / Capitalism gone mad / It sad and getting more bad / Because / doux-doux / Capitalism / gone mad.” 16. Mohammed, “A Very Public Private Man,” 156. 17. Williams, Inward Hunger, 149. 18. Ibid., 159. Cited by Patricia Mohammed as having been quoted by Williams, who attributed the quote to George Lamming in a PNM Weekly article. It was later reprinted in part in Callaloo 20, no. 4 (1998): 731–36. 19. Boodhoo, “Economic Thoughts and Economic Policy,” 51–64. 20. His rejection of the advanced socialist system notwithstanding, Williams envisioned “economic independence and greater cultural autonomy” in his third five-year plan. By 1970 he believed the state should assume majority ownership in key enterprises: petrochemicals, the sugar industry, and the flour mills. As with Michael Manley’s democratic socialism of the same decade, majority participation did not result in local control. But the rhetoric in Jamaica was far more strident than in Trinidad and Tobago, giving the impression that “nationalization” of key enterprises was far more significant there than in Trinidad. 21. Urquhart, “Between Sovereignty and Globalisation,” 13. 22. Ibid. The reference is to the demonstrations by First World youth in large part at the World Trade Organization meetings held in Seattle in 2000. Urquhart says, “In some places, young people are beginning to see the global economy as the new enemy—faceless, ruthless, enormously powerful, not accountable and non-transparent.” 23. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean. 24. Williams, Inward Hunger, 144. 25. Williams, “Address to the Fifth Meeting of the Heads of Government of the Commonwealth Caribbean,” February 3, 1969 (see Hall, The Caribbean Community); and “Address

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to the 15th Annual PNM Annual Conference,” 1973: “Clear beyond any possibility of a doubt that Caribbean integration will not be achieved in the foreseeable future and that the reality is continued. Caribbean disunity and even perhaps the re-affirmation of colonialism.” 26. Sealy, Sealy’s Caribbean Leaders, 191. 27. Ryan, “The Limits of Executive Power.” 28. Sealy, Sealy’s Caribbean Leaders, 201. Sealy quotes Norman Manley, the patrician, iconic Jamaican founding father, as saying, “I’ve just got a letter from Eric Williams [after an unsuccessful conference on federation held in Antigua]. Nobody, but nobody, nobody in my life has been as rude to me as he has been in this letter.” That killed the friendship, says Sealy, “but made both Jamaica and Trinidad independent nations” (italics mine). Norman Manley had, in more cordial times, said of Williams, “[He] should not be thought of as only a split personality. He is the most complicated little man I have ever met.” 29. Speech given by Marcus Garvey in Menelik Hall, Nova Scotia, in 1937, enjoining Canadian Negroes to “emancipate [themselves] from mental slavery,” since only they and no one else could do it. Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae composer, was to popularize Garvey’s injunction in the powerful lines of his renowned “Redemption Song.” 30. The Grand Anse Declaration ordained the University of the West Indies as a regional institution charged “indefinitely” with the responsibility of providing the skills needed for regional development. 31. Williams, “PNM Perspectives: Speech to PNM Conference,” November 22, 1970, following on the Black Power disturbances earlier in that year. 32. Williams, “Massa Day Done,” 5. 33. Sealy, Sealy’s Caribbean Leaders, 206.

chapter 2

eric WiLLiams The making of a West indian intellectual maurice sT. Pierre

This essay deals with a neglected facet of the life of Dr. Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister and leader in its struggle for political independence: his role as an intellectual. Much has been written about Williams as a historian and a politician, as well as about his personal life. But with the possible exception of C. L. R. James’s A Convention Appraisal and Ivar Oxaal’s Black Intellectuals Come to Power, no real effort to deal with Williams as an intellectual has been attempted. This essay, which uses a conflated theoretical perspective that privileges biography, social movement theory, and intellectualism, hopes to fill that lacuna. I argue that Williams was an intellectual in three distinct but interrelated senses of the term. First, as an academic intellectual, Williams acquired what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as cultural capital, that is, the specialized knowledge and credentials of a professional historian.1 This knowledge enabled Williams to acquire the honor and prestige, that is, the symbolic capital, associated with being a professional historian, which, in turn, lent itself to his credibility as a public intellectual. This later enabled Williams to acquire contextual relevance and eventually to produce a body of work that would enable him to become a social movement intellectual, obtaining the mandate as a movement leader and then speaking on behalf of his socially constructed public.2 Erving Goffman asserts that because no two individuals can have the same biography, one’s biography is therefore critical in explaining one’s thoughts. Thus this essay briefly examines Williams’s life experiences and webbed relationships with various biographical others, who include family members, supporters, detractors, and so on. However, in contrast to Goffman’s usage of this concept to understand identity formation, I use these biographical others as a means of knowledge production.3 Interactions with biographical others in educational and political contexts are especially relevant because 39

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these experiences can be transformative and thus account for intellectual activity. Also, as a “social fact,” or the constellation of values and norms that constituted the colonial experience in Trinidad and Tobago, to which the young Eric Williams was exposed, biography helps us understand the choices and hierarchization of resources he used in the political independence movement to assail colonialism.4 Historically perceived negatively, social movement participants were thought to be exponents of irrational conduct and concerned with seeking the destruction of civilization. This view has fallen into desuetude, however, since many movement leaders, like Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Eric Williams, were well educated and concerned with improving a system that provided little opportunity for the disadvantaged. The actions of social movements and their leaders are now often perceived as rational on the part of the aggrieved. Two theoretical perspectives reflect this view. Resource mobilization theory looks at the way movement leaders use various resources, such as specialized knowledge, time, energy, collective frames, and previously organized entities, to mobilize and educate their followers for protracted social change, such as political independence.5 Cognitive praxis, in turn, concerns itself with the “new” knowledge (i.e., intellectual activity) that results from the efforts of social movements and their leaders.6 As socially constructed types, intellectuals never seem satisfied with things as they are; they are critics of existing regimes, are part of the historical process, and generate new ways of looking at society; as human actors they reinvent cultural traditions in different contexts.7 Some view intellectuals as providing “an interpretation of the world for that society,” whose “ideas are such that they challenge conventional wisdom or, at least, invite us to see the obvious in a new light.”8 Beyond that, intellectuals—especially of the diasporan variety—are tasked with speaking the “truth,” which Michel Foucault defines as “the ensemble of rules according to which ‘true’ and ‘false’ are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true.” This means not merely changing people’s consciousness or even what is in their heads, and therefore not a matter “of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power),” but instead “detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony—social, economic and cultural—within which it operates at the present time.”9 Thus, railing against an oppressive system like colonialism enables the intellectual to move issues of concern from the periphery to the center for more serious consideration and ventilation, thereby creating space for “new

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knowledge” in the sociopolitical fabric. This is usually accomplished by efforts “to make ‘scientific’ sense of the world,”10 as well as by generating various theories of society that, in turn, make history. Social theories—historical or otherwise—therefore “are levers intellectuals use to influence power structures, to facilitate political outcomes, to enable groups interested in exercising control to improve their [chances of doing so], to justify their ascendancy, to achieve their goals, or to advance their interests.”11 As “knowledge entrepreneurs,” intellectuals create a public, that is, consumers for their product, and, by extension, a market for their knowledge about the ongoing relevance of their product. Apart from being socially constructed, this knowledge is historically situated in the sense that “new” knowledge reflects the prevailing intellectual spirit of the age, or zeitgeist. earLy sTirrings in Trinidad

Williams was born on September 25, 1911, and from his autobiography, Inward Hunger, we learn that he was the eldest of twelve children, one of whom died at nine months. His father was a minor post office employee who, because he lacked the three major criteria for upward social mobility—color, money, and education (he probably had no more than a primary school training)—would assiduously provide the resources to permit his son to overcome these barriers and, ultimately, make it possible for him to live vicariously through his son’s accomplishments.12 These accomplishments included, among other things, winning a college exhibition before his eleventh birthday; earning the house scholarship at Queen’s Royal College (QRC), the island’s premier secondary school; and winning the prestigious Island Scholarship, of which only one was awarded each year, in October 1931. Williams attended the Tranquillity Training School, which stressed an educational discipline that emphasized English grammar, spelling, dictation, arithmetic, and geography, and whose principal was J. O. Cutteridge, an Englishman. Cutteridge, who did not possess a college degree, would later be appointed as the colony’s director of education and wrote a number of textbooks called the West Indian Readers and West Indian Geographies, which, though “pedagogically irreproachable,” nevertheless “presented West Indian life in a disparaging light.”13 The Trinidadian directors of education, according to the historian Carl Campbell, “were expected to be tough reformers, and to bring education practices in the colonies more in line with ‘modern’ developments in

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contemporary England.”14 Among the changes Cutteridge executed during his directorship was to convert Tranquillity into an English training college, with the boys’ school structured like British intermediate schools. Teachers were closely supervised and thoroughly subordinated by managers, inspectors, and directors. The student was viewed as a moldable entity, with the education system functioning as a catalyst for the development of all the intellectual powers of the mind and body. In addition, payments to teachers were based on results.15 As Williams comments sardonically in Inward Hunger: Nothing reveals more clearly Britain’s control of Trinidadian life in all its forms, its domination of the civil service, than the appointment, by the Secretary of State for the Colonies more than forty years ago, of an Englishman as principal of an elementary school. If a Trinidadian was not qualified for such a post, then what was he qualified for? Cutteridge was not a university graduate. His policy at Tranquillity was openly designed to make the school more English in its outlook.16 His remarkable success in the college exhibition examination enabled Williams to choose between pursuing his studies at the state-run QRC or with the Catholic college St. Mary’s, which was private but government subsidized; he chose QRC. Williams recalls the parish priest calling on the Williams house to offer his congratulations, naturally assuming that young Eric would attend St. Mary’s because the family was Catholic. When the priest learned otherwise, he “with a look of consternation” not only argued and remonstrated but threatened Williams’s parents with excommunication. Williams recalls this transformative moment in his life: I remained curiously unmoved and the idea ran through my mind that if anyone was to be excommunicated, I should be. Was it an early inability to see any connection between religion and education, the school and the church? Or an early preference for state over private enterprise under West Indian conditions? Or the first faint glimmering of anti-colonialism? . . . Or the first indication that religion was profoundly to influence my life? I cannot say.17 Williams’s experiences at QRC were also illustrative of the colonial education system in general and colonialism in particular. He became immersed in the pedantry of the system where Latin, his favorite subject in which he

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invariably obtained distinctions, was emphasized, as were French, Spanish, and his “special” subject, British colonial history.18 It was not until 1939— fully eight years after he left QRC—that “West Indian history was included in the secondary curriculum. Even so it was only at School Certificate level, and I have been told by teachers that it was studied only by the ‘weaker boys’; a ‘stronger’ boy would, it was claimed, be distracted by it from the improvement of his foundation in English history preparatory to the more advanced history of the island scholarship class.”19 Further, though an Englishman was always held the principalship of QRC, Williams was very much influenced by a cadre of West Indian teachers who were university graduates and whose brilliance outmatched the rewards they received from the system; what is more, these role models never hesitated to show what they thought of Cutteridge’s appointment as director of education. The positive influence these West Indian biographical others had on Williams unalterably influenced his decision to enter the teaching profession after winning the prestigious Island Scholarship rather than pursue medicine or law. The senior Williams made clear his preference for the latter fields due to the financial security and independence they offered, which, in the absence of a West Indian university, were viewed as extremely important to a person of color. However, as Williams once revealed, he fainted at the sight of his own blood after cutting a finger, so he decided he could not become a doctor.20 His decision instead to read for an honors degree in history at England’s Oxford University was therefore completely opposed by his father. The elder Williams used every artifice at his disposal to persuade his son to do “the right thing,” which led Williams to compare his father to “the Governor in a Crown colony,” one who exercised total authority over the affairs of the territory.21 Thus at an early age Eric Williams asserted his own independence, arguably a key personality trait for a leader of a social movement. Another experience at QRC greatly transformed Williams; as he recalls: Two fully grown coloured boys, one of them among the leading cricketers and footballers in the school, had thrashed a young white boy who had called them “niggers.” The boy went home howling and complained to his parents, who reported the matter to the principal, a white clergyman. The principal assembled the entire school, called on two of the teachers, one of them notorious for his strength of arm, and gave the two boys a choice: public whipping or expulsion. They chose to be whipped, and got twelve lashes each.22

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This type of negative sanction, an integral part of the cultural underbelly of colonialism, according to Williams, “reflected the policy of public humiliation and the fetish of the whip which was a legacy of enslavement.”23 Like another well-known against-the-grain Trinbagonian contemporary, C. L. R. James, Williams contradicted the “colonialist mentality” that talented nonwhites should study for a profession abroad, return home, and enter politics as an elected member before being nominated by the governor to the Upper House.24 Williams had no mere intention of perpetuating the colonial system or merely amending it on the margin; instead he wanted to dismantle it completely and replace it with his view of a Trinbagonian variant. Clearly, then, as James himself had done with respect to West Indian cricket in Beyond a Boundary, Williams’s treatment of the education system was akin to another aspect of Émile Durkheim’s notion of a “social fact.” Here education is viewed as a prism consisting of a bundle of rights, duties, norms, and values,25 through which one could view colonialism and the crown colony government. Life aBroad: The academic inTeLLecTuaL is credenTiaLized

The oxford experience After winning the Island Scholarship, Williams attended Oxford University, and his experiences of racism there greatly contributed to his formative perceptions as an emerging political leader. He recalls that a “long-nosed” first-year colleague once questioned his intellectual capacity, and implicitly his right to be at the university, by asking whether English was spoken in Trinidad. The colleague’s comments were reinforced by the fact that while others were provided some notations on their Latin examinations, Williams was not. It turned out that his tutor felt that his work was so superior and he could do it “standing on my head” and excused him from continuing with the class.26 Another transformative incident occurred in Williams’s junior year during an oral examination in French in front of a number of fellows. Williams made a “horrible mistake,” eliciting a “roar” by those in attendance, which, Williams concluded, was directed at him and not the mistake. Feeling “sobered” at once, he took the time to look directly at each fellow until quiet was restored, and refused to translate a final passage for fear of “giv[ing] rise to another such guffaw.”27 Williams remained convinced that his race was a

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factor, especially some days later when one of his fellows eyed him curiously when passing him in the street without speaking.28 Despite these and other slights, Williams put the self-discipline he learned at Tranquillity and the knowledge of Latin and history he acquired at QRC to good use along with, importantly, a growing appreciation of literature and art as “sources for the understanding of and appraisal of historical development.”29 Also, at Oxford the subject of history became for Williams not merely “a record of battles and politicians, dates and events, or even of the follies and foibles of mankind, but rather a record of the development of humanity, of life and of society, in all their various manifestations.”30 He would eventually graduate with first class honors in 1935. Armed with the new knowledge he had gained, Williams considered continuing his studies by pursuing a diploma in education, presumably as a prerequisite for a career in teaching. However, given his stellar performance at the undergraduate level, both his college principal and his tutor urged him to proceed to more rigorous and “advanced” academic work with the aim of receiving a fellowship at one of Oxford’s colleges, preferably All Souls. This decision meant spending the next two years reading for a degree in politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE), as well as satisfying the social etiquette requirements involved, what Williams referred to as “trial by dinner.”31 But he found great difficulty in applying a historical approach—or, for that matter, any approach in sympathy with the Caribbean context from whence he came—to the fields of either philosophy or economics. Despite a positive relationship with his politics tutor, Williams decided to abandon the PPE and, therefore, any chance of an All Souls fellowship and instead chose to pursue a doctorate in history. In pursuing the doctorate, which he considered to be the second most important decision he made in his life (the other being to read history in preparation for a teaching career), his choice of topic was powered by two main desires: to research an issue germane to the West Indies, and to examine the prevailing expert view that the abolition of slavery was promulgated by a group of humanitarians whose activities aroused the conscience of the British people and, ultimately, that of the British government to terminate “man’s greatest inhumanity to man.”32 At Oxford, Williams’s academic intellectual maturation was also a result of his relationship with an important biographical other, C. L. R. James, his former tutor at QRC, who had left Trinidad for England in 1932. Recalled being asked in an interview for a University of Texas publication if there were parallels in political theory between his The Black Jacobins and Williams’s

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Capitalism and Slavery and whether he had helped Williams write his book, James revealed that “Williams used to come to my house in London and spend his vacations with me. When working on The Black Jacobins, I went to France to do work there. . . . Williams would go with me. He is a marvelous man at getting documents and keeping things in order.”33 James also noted that Williams used to send him “his papers from Oxford on Rousseau, on Plato, and on Aristotle for my comments,” and that after Williams passed his bachelor’s examinations, he came to him, “as he usually did,” with the question “I am to do a doctorate; what shall I write on?” to which James responded, “I know exactly what you should write on. I have done the economic basis of slavery emancipation as it was in France. But that has never been done in Great Britain. . . . A lot of people think the British showed goodwill. There were lots of people who had goodwill; but it was the basis, the economic basis, that allowed the goodwill to function.”34 Continuing, James revealed that in response to Williams’s query “Well what shall I say?” he replied, “I sat down and wrote what the thesis should be with my own hand and I gave it to him. He must have copied it down and [taken] it to the Oxford authorities. Later, he told me they said it was fine. . . . I saw the manuscript quite often, I read it about three or four times. The facts themselves and the road he was to take, I wrote that for him.”35 Ultimately Williams was awarded the doctorate in history in December 1938 for his thesis “The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indies Slave Trade and Slavery.” So superior was Williams’s work that one of his doctoral examiners, a proponent of the opposing position that Williams adopted in his thesis, stated that, were he to revise his own work on the subject, he would have to make fundamental changes based on Williams’s astute findings. Significantly, Williams’s last year of historical research was hampered by a serious lack of money, as his scholarship had ended and remedial efforts had proved abortive. Since Williams felt systematic racism was partially responsible for halting his efforts to obtain financial assistance, he fired off a letter to the principal of his college on the matter, the result of which was some amount of financial relief. His time at Oxford left Williams acutely aware of racism toward him as a colonial subject, which, coupled with his previous experience at QRC, undoubtedly fueled his desire to see an end to colonial rule in the country of his birth. His doctoral research taught him the historian’s techniques (or habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term) of using primary source data and reasoned arguments to rail against the unacceptable. Knowledge acquisition, production, and dissemination would become the cardinal tenets of Williams’s

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intellectual activity and would later manifest themselves through his role as a political independence leader. The howard experience Having decided that the chances of employment commensurate with his educational qualifications were unlikely if he remained, Williams left England to accept an offer of employment at Howard University in Washington, DC. Landing in New York on August 7, 1939, he soon became acquainted with the “congestion, dilapidation, and squalor to which Negros were subjected.”36 While at Howard, Williams made contact with a number of renowned intellectuals: Rayford Logan; Abram Harris, who chaired Howard’s Department of Economics; Alain Locke, a fellow Oxford graduate and the first African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship; and Ralph Bunche, who headed the Department of Political Science. In contrast to the small tutorial sessions that characterized the Oxford experience, the large numbers of students in his social science survey course at Howard provided Williams with the invaluable experience of “the mechanics of mass education,” which later fueled the success of his populist lectures at the University of Woodford Square during his political career and as a social movement intellectual.37 While on the Howard faculty, Williams published a number of scholarly papers, most notably in the Journal of Negro History, and books such as The Negro in the Caribbean and the seminal Capitalism and Slavery, the research for which exposed him to other aspects of intellectual activity. In this context I refer to Williams’s production of “new” knowledge, his willingness to expose his ideas to critical assessment by experts (in some cases soi-disant [self-styled] experts), and his ability to successfully transmit his thoughts to a wider audience and to move his doctoral ideas into the public sphere. In Capitalism and Slavery, which was based in part on his doctoral thesis and published in 1944, Williams effectively argued that, in addition to the efforts of the humanitarians, the confluence of economic factors—the inefficiency of forced labor, the rebellious activities of the slaves, and the termination of the transatlantic slave trade—led to the crown’s decision to end slavery in the West Indies. Williams responded favorably to both detractors and supporters of his main argument in Capitalism and Slavery. Colin Palmer’s introduction to the 1994 edition speaks to a neglected aspect of intellectual activity: the trials and tribulations that intellectuals (especially those who challenge the conventional wisdom) have to deal with before a publication sees the light of day.38

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Despite these barriers, Williams felt compelled to place his “new” knowledge at the disposal of a wider audience and to engage intellectually with others as a teacher of this learned information. This posture would remain throughout his life. In fact, that so late in his life he made available to Palmer a number of his personal documents testifies to his intellectual belief that knowledge is important, should be disseminated, and should outlive its producer. While still at Howard in 1945, Williams wrote a number of proposals regarding the need for a singular unified British West Indian university.39 Here he argued that a university is a mirror of the society in which it exists, whose “mission is not to transmit an abstract ‘culture,’ but to impart to young men and women an education in conformity with the economy and the constitution of the particular community which it is established to serve.”40 He maintained that the West Indian university should be research oriented, thus providing the graduate with a better understanding of his or her environment. He felt it should be an independent entity, thereby avoiding the “insidious dangers of imitation and affiliation” likely to occur when an institution is financially dependent on other countries.41 He also proposed that the university should be unitary rather than comprise a number of university colleges in various islands and that the curriculum be designed specifically for the British West Indies. Additionally, Williams completed a manuscript in 1946 titled Education in the British West Indies that aimed to “stimulate attention among those in Great Britain and the United States who are interested either in education or in the British West Indies” and “not only to bring to the British West Indian people themselves some information, but also encourage them to consider how far a British West Indian University affects them, and to what degree their interests can affect what is about to be undertaken.”42 Indeed, Williams’s scholarly activities at Howard were of such a high caliber that they prompted John Hope Franklin (who later became professor emeritus of history at Duke University and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor) to write that what most impressed him about Williams was “his preoccupation with a variety of projects and his complete absorption with his teaching and research. I was greatly inspired by the manner in which he went about his work and I have no doubt that my own ambitious program in research and writing was inspired, in part, by the example set by Williams.”43 Finally, before leaving Howard and working in a part-time capacity with the Caribbean Commission, Williams received two fellowships that enabled him to travel and research extensively throughout the Caribbean. Therefore,

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by the time he returned to Trinidad and Tobago in 1948, Williams had acquired a tremendous amount of knowledge and had written extensively about the region. Likewise, his time spent interacting with a number of US civil rights activists and individuals from other colonial territories created the base on which his reputation as a radical public intellectual would stand.44 The naTive son reTurns: crediBiLiTy and The PuBLic inTeLLecTuaL

Upon his return to Trinidad, Williams’s efforts to consolidate his role as a public intellectual or, as Jerzy Szacki might put it, to fail to “mind his own business” saw him coming out of “the libraries and laboratories into the political market-place” and thereby into the forum of public life. This sense of mission to act on behalf of the masses, Szacki stresses, is “intrinsic to the consciousness of the intellectual.”45 Williams accomplished this by using his knowledge of history as a resource for the education of his public, speaking to the colonized lifeworld and the quotidian trials and tribulations of Trinbagonians.46 Before his permanent return to Trinidad, Williams began his journey as a public intellectual via two lectures he presented while visiting Trinidad in April 1944: “The University of the West Indies” to a packed house at QRC, and “The British West Indies in World History” at the Trinidad Public Library. However, arguably Williams’s first real effort to make space for himself and his ideas in Trinidad began on November 9, 1954, during a Public Library lecture titled “Some World Famous Educational Theories and Developments Relevant to West Indian Conditions.” In it he cited Aristotle’s distinction between two classes of people, citizens and slaves, and this discussion, along with his views on a single state-run university, surprisingly seemed to justify slavery in the eyes of his audience. During the question-and-answer period, Williams was asked to defend his main argument for state control of education by Dom Basil Matthews, a distinguished black churchman who himself held a PhD from Fordham University and had attended a 1943 conference Williams had cosponsored with E. Franklin Frazier. Since this was a familiar topic of discussion on the twin-island, the ensuing debate between the two men “was clearly a major occasion in the intellectual life of the colony,” so much so that by the time Williams gave his rejoinder in a later lecture titled “Some Misconceptions of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Education,” reportedly, he had “difficulty in getting through the hundreds who were pleading for

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admission to the already crowded Library. Some even suggested to Dr. Williams at the gates that he transfer the lecture to the Grand Stand at the Savannah or to Woodford Square.”47 A new format for the dispensation of knowledge had arrived in Trinbagonian politics, and with it a new day, specifically in regard to nationalism. Williams would be the lecturer, the audience his students, and a setting other than a conventional university classroom was the location. Those not able to gain entrance to the library would be able to acquire the necessary education by way of another collective action resource—the loudspeaker—and later through published versions of Williams’s lectures. No textbooks were required, and the only examination would come in September 1956 at the next general election. Williams’s experiences at the Caribbean Commission stood as another opportunity for him to ensconce himself in the political landscape while educating the masses about the problem of colonialism. His tenure with the commission was, if anything, a stormy one. Williams once again took principled stands against what he perceived as injustices based on racial preferences, situations in which privileged, incompetent white expatriates put black colonial employees and subjects at repeated disadvantage.48 Williams’s situation was exacerbated by the commission’s negative reaction to The Negro in the Caribbean; as Williams explained in a letter to Jamaican premier Norman Manley on June 17, 1954, justifying his oral and written teachings: “I am persecuted because of my writings; I think therefore I ought write some more.”49 This statement, which would find expression first in the completion of his autobiography, was the first of a three-pronged weapon Williams used in his fight with the commission and the secretariat; the second was to undertake an adult education campaign, and the third was to carry the fight to the metropolitan enemy, that is, colonialism. The Negro in the Caribbean was a relatively short book published by a little-known publisher, while in contrast, Capitalism and Slavery was extensive and published by the prestigious University of North Carolina Press. With The Negro in the Caribbean, Williams was more concerned with content and disseminating the word than with the prestige of the publisher. His titular reference to the “Negro” referred not to physiognomy but to the structural position of colonized individuals, especially vis-à-vis the paramountcy of external political control and the centrality of “King Sugar.” He would later build on this idea, and the personification of colonist figures, in his “Massa Day Done” address of 1961.

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With the usual attention to scholarly references and analytical thinking, The Negro in the Caribbean showed how one’s relationship to the economy influenced one’s ranking in society and explained life chances in terms of longevity, quality of life, opportunities for education, and so on. Williams explained how lighter-skinned individuals considered themselves to be superior to their darker-skinned counterparts. He illustrated the dynamic when an educated black male married a white woman: the couple received better opportunities because the colonial system felt the woman should be able to live in the European manner and style. He explained why sugar workers were prone to hookworm-related diseases because their poverty forced them to go about barefooted, the worm making entry to the body through the soles of their feet. Poverty of the colonial Negro worsened, he also explained, because of high unemployment and lack of pay during the off-season of sugar production. Moreover, the colonial powers de-emphasized education with respect to the East Indian worker so as to perpetuate a ready supply of cheap plantation labor. The arguments raised in Capitalism and Slavery and The Negro in the Caribbean, and in a document Williams allegedly wrote in support of the abolition of private property, helped create the impression that he was a dangerous leftist, and were used as evidence to claim him unfit for commission employment. As a result, the US State Department, while recognizing that Williams was “widely and, in general, favorably known in the Caribbean and considered by West Indians as the foremost historian of the Caribbean,” initially opposed his appointment as deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council (CRC). This conclusion was based on the State Department’s assessment that the document in question was “fairly conclusive evidence” that Williams had “violated his duties to the Commission,” since the CRC deputy chairmanship required “above all, careful and objective scholarship and research directed to the purposes of the organization.”50 However, the State Department did withdraw its opposition based on (a) an investigation of his background and qualifications, (b) informal conversations with responsible government officials whose judgment the Department respected, (c) more formal investigation of security agencies, and (d) the staunch support of the other three Commissioners. The reversal carried the proviso that should Williams be appointed, commission cochairman Ward Canaday would retain the power to suggest Williams’s work be “reviewed by an appropriate technical group to correct any lapses in judgment of the kind that led to the Department’s earlier letter.”51

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This exchange is all the more relevant in understanding Williams’s political persona for a number of reasons. Not only does it help to understand Williams’s later problems with the commission, but it illustrates the influence the United States wielded over—and held in—it. The commission was an outgrowth of the wartime Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC), originally founded in March 1942 under a joint US and British mandate. The AACC was a temporary advisory body charged with making cooperative recommendations to both nations’ governments for addressing the rapidly deteriorating economic and social conditions in the wartime Caribbean. Such deterioration presented a threat not merely to the political stability of these territories but also to the security of their joint naval bases. Further, Canaday was an administrative official for Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, Ohio, and friend to US senator Robert Taft and other Ohio Republicans; his, and other top appointments to the commission, were not made on technical grounds but instead based on political considerations.52 Arguably, the AACC’s activities were part of a colonial construct with political and economic interests and were not in line with Williams’s nationalist ideas as far as the Caribbean was concerned. While employed by the commission, Williams also developed his second weapon of attack: an adult education campaign with the Trinidad Public Library as his “intellectual headquarters” rather than his commission office at Kent House. In stating that if “imperialism attacked from Kent House, then nationalism would counter-attack from the Public Library,”53 Williams did not merely allude to the commission’s embodiment of colonialism but aligned his personal experiences with oppression to those of all Trinbagonians. Furthermore, this nontraditional form of education sought to mobilize and raise the consciousness of his followers, urging them to want to seek political independence. Accordingly, from September 1954 to May 1955, Williams gave a series of lectures on topics ranging from the state of West Indian education to the history of West Indian culture to the meaning of West Indian identity; in short, his lectures explored the themes of nationalism and independence. This is contextually important to understanding Williams’s intellectual activity, not merely because he was continuing to use specialized knowledge and presenting it in a highly public space, but also because he was pressing his other resources, such as time and energy, into the service of consciousness-raising.

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The movemenT inTeLLecTuaL and reLevance concerning PoLiTicaL indePendence

Williams’s emergence as a social movement intellectual and the knowledge he generated as a result of the role he played in the independence movement cannot be understood without reference to the extant political opportunity structure (POS). The sociologist Sidney Tarrow describes a POS as opportunities with “consistent dimensions . . . of the political environments that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting people’s expectations of success or failure.”54 Moreover, for opportunities to be seized, individuals must perceive them as real. During the Williams political era, the POS lay in the structural factors that enabled Trinbagonians, arguably, “to create, build upon, and seize opportunities to act collectively, as well as those that constrain such activity,”55 that is, the growing dislike by colonials of the imposed European social and economic structure, their budding interest in Caribbean history, and their increased level of educational attainment. Historically, therefore, it is apposite to remember that the 1930s saw a number of industrial disturbances in the oil fields of Trinidad that catapulted a Grenadian-born transplant Uriah Butler into political prominence. Butler would eventually form his own political party, the Butler Home Rule Party, which would win the most seats in Trinidad and Tobago’s 1950 elections, witnessing an increase in electoral participation compared to the 1946 elections from 52.9 percent to 67.02 percent.56 And although Butler’s speeches in the legislature were described as “rambling,” of particular significance is that he later addressed the national question of home rule. During a meeting held at Woodford Square on September 5, 1952, for instance, Butler declared, “We want Home Rule man! That is the name of the Butler party. We want freedom, liberty, and independence and we are going to get [it] even if we have to seek it and find it in the grave.”57 Also part of the POS were two resolutions from the Trinidad and Tobago Labour Party stating that all elections—legislative, municipal, and for the county council—should be based on full adult suffrage provided for by a new constitution. Then-governor Sir John Shaw, however, advised the secretary of state for the colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, that the time was inopportune for abolition of the income and property qualifications for membership in these councils.58 This advice was accepted by Creech-Jones, who, though deeming himself ill-suited to reach such a decision about the councils in question, agreed with the governor that the resolutions came from “a comparatively unimportant section of the community.”59

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Further, Creech-Jones felt that the resolutions would encourage “the election of irresponsible persons as members of those councils,” so he suggested that the governor merely acknowledge the Labour Party’s request. 60 That meeting minutes taken by various Colonial Office civil servants undergirded Creech-Jones’s decision constitutes another example of the manner in which imperial policy was constructed and reconstructed, and illustrates the process by which knowledge was generated with respect to the political independence movement. Yet another facet of the POS that facilitated Williams’s foothold as a movement intellectual was that, before the founding of his People’s National Movement Party (PNM) in January 1956, Trinbagonian politics were essentially dominated by individuals like Butler, Bhadase Sagan Maraj, and especially Albert Gomes. After the 1950 elections, Gomes was described as the “ablest of the five elected Ministers with the strongest personality among them,” and as possessing interests beyond those involving solely Trinidad, though the governor was troubled by Gomes’s tendency to “play to the gallery” before the press.61 In seeking to put some distance between the PNM and the prevailing tendency toward personalized politics, and in continuing to educate and mobilize his audiences, Williams noted that, after political education, the most important prerequisite of a political party was honesty. Therefore he had inveighed against the prevailing politics of “anything goes,” a term he claimed was made infamous by Gomes.62 This concept had manifested itself, Williams argued, in the existing “dishonesty and immorality,” that is, the graft, corruption, and broken promises by politicians, and the squandermania of taxes, with ministers coming and going like “absentee landlords paying routine visits to the Caribbean to check up on their plantations, to hush up a scandal, to open up a big house, and to enjoy a little sunshine.”63 In passing, reference might be made to the threat of socialism of any kind. Since 1948, the United States had become concerned about the possible rooting of communism in the Caribbean region, and this worry spread among the imperial governments of various Caribbean countries. Thus, when the Jamaicans Billy Strachan and Ferdinand Smith, who were considered communists—Smith in particular was alleged to be a member of various US communist groups—arrived in Trinidad on April 23, 1952, they were declared “undesirable visitors” and asked to leave. When they refused, they were arrested, held in custody, and taken before the nearest magistrate, who then upheld the deportation order. They subsequently left for British Guiana, where they were likewise declared undesirable visitors.64

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But the political landscape in British Guiana was changing. The People’s Progressive Party (PPP), founded in 1950 and led by the Marxist Dr. Cheddi Jagan, won the majority of the votes cast during the first election held under universal suffrage in 1953. Fearful that the party was instituting policies believed to be communist, the British government sent troops to the colony, suspended the constitution, and ousted the government after just 133 days in office. In Trinidad, the only avowedly communist party was the West Indian Independence Party, the only political party, interestingly enough, to express support for the PPP after its expulsion. Perhaps with this in mind, as well as the previously mentioned concern of being dubbed a “leftist,” Williams felt it necessary to deal with the full gravamen of the PNM’s ideology by stating: The PNM states categorically that it is neither communist, Fascist, Poujadist nor Messianic or Jaganist. It is a national Party, deriving its inspiration from the best in democratic theory, seeking to imitate the best in democratic practice, applying to the affairs of Trinidad and Tobago the intelligence, the democratic party discipline and public morality which in the opinion of the PNM are lacking from the political life of our community.65

sTraTegy and TacTics

As mentioned, social movement analysts draw attention to the importance of enabling infrastructural factors that lend themselves to movement activity and ensuing intellectual conduct. The lectures that Williams delivered before his return in 1948 to Trinidad and Tobago stand as one example. At one of these lectures, “The British West Indies in World History,” which took place on April 19, 1944, at the Trinidad Public Library to what he recalled as an overflowing audience, Williams sought to further disseminate the ideas contained in the lecture, so he asked the librarian Carlton Comma to produce a number of copies of the lecture to sell at a modest price (the proceeds of which would go to the library) and to send to some of Williams’s biographical others.66 However, as time went on, Williams’s socially constructed public became too large and the library inadequate to accommodate those who wanted to hear his anticolonial railings. Accordingly, Woodford Square, a public park in the downtown area of Port of Spain, was pressed into service. The square,

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which was close to both the library and Parliament, had been the site where rebellious slaves were hanged and was named after Sir Ralph Woodford, the colonial governor who had refused a black doctor the right to practice his profession on the grounds that his mother had been enslaved. It is therefore easy to understand why Williams chose the square as a locale for the education of his followers and subsequently referred to it as “the University of Woodford Square” and the “People’s Parliament.” Williams’s emergence as a social movement intellectual was also facilitated by the existence of a number of previously organized entities—or, for our purposes, “biographical groups,” as opposed to individual biographical others. These collectives take the form of what Alberto Melucci refers to as “submerged” networks, or what Aldon Morris calls “halfway houses,” or what Belinda Robnett describes as “bridge organizations.” Submerged networks lie hidden until their emergence is deemed appropriate by the movement, and their usefulness lies in that they are already organized, while halfway houses are usually partially submerged and therefore do not usually attain national prominence. Bridge organizations connect the movement organization and the formal leadership of the movement.67 Toward the end of 1954, for example, Williams and other individuals formed a weekly study group called the Bachacs. The group included Winston Mahabir, whom Williams had met while Mahabir was a medical student at McGill University; Ibbit Mosaheb, who first met Williams as a student at Howard University and subsequently became vice-chairman of the PNM; and Halsey McShine, whom Williams knew at QRC. The Bachacs group was so named after “those fantastic ants,” as Mahabir recalls, “whose characteristics include the ability to destroy apparently healthy plants—especially imported rose bushes—by a team effort involving a sophisticated communication system.”68 Seemingly, then, the group’s intent was to reflect on and later “nibble away” at the existing colonial system before replacing it with a variant more in keeping with the needs of the society. In other words, there would be an autochthonous factor to anticolonial activity in Trinidad and Tobago on the part of Williams and other movement intellectuals. The Bachacs disbanded after the group deemed that more active anticolonial action was required, but its main significance as a submerged network was that it promulgated a “nibbling” strategy, forming the genesis of more comprehensive anticolonial activities to be later adopted by Williams and other movement intellectuals. In addition to the Bachacs, Williams was associated with the Teachers’ Economic and Cultural Association (TECA), formally established in both

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Trinidad and Tobago by July 1942.69 Besides De Wilton Rogers, the founding members of TECA were John S. Donaldson, W. J. Alexander, A. A. Alexander, Cecil Alexander, and Donald Pierre, all young male Roman Catholic teachers. Among the aims of TECA were “to co-ordinate and synthesise all movements for the economic and cultural advance of the teacher and to stimulate the social progress of the people” and “to promote functions, lectures, scholarships, studies for the cultural advance of its members.”70 These goals blended harmoniously with Williams’s role as a political educator. In addition, Rogers and Donaldson helped organize and educate teachers on the unacceptability of “dual control,” whereby the curriculum and the control of schools lay in the hands of managers who were often members of the clergy, and, like Williams, emphasized the importance of formal and political education. This merged nicely with halfway houses like the Political Education Group (PEG), whose main function was to take political education to the masses, and the Political Education Movement (PEM), the important bridge organization to its successor, the PNM. The transformation of the PEM into the PNM was achieved by a form of intellectual activity described as “dialectical reasoning,” which trumpeted the idea of the political party as a distinctly innovative political organization,71 rather than one that merely mimicked existing political parties, and political action that fulminated against the politics of “anything goes.” In addition to TECA, Williams’s relationships with a number of femaleled organizations were instrumental in facilitating his emergence as a movement intellectual. The island-wide Federation of Women’s Institutes led by Mrs. Isabel Teshea, for example, functioned as a bridge organization within the ambit of the PEM and the PNM. The Women’s Council of TECA benefited from the association’s efforts to obtain equal pay for female teachers compared to their male counterparts, and Williams himself championed the idea of university education for women. Thus, in regard to the system of social differentiation that worked against women, Williams noted that “in its adult education programme, even more than on the undergraduate level, the University should have a special part to play in the education of women, who are still so heavily handicapped by their economic status and the traditional conception of the role of women in society.”72 Referring to the connection between women and the PNM and Williams’s role, Marilyn Gordon notes: In the early 1950s the large majority of women in this country were basically not involved in the politics of the country. Few of them dared

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to become involved, mainly because of the social environment of the time. Most of the women were housewives. Some were employed in the traditional professions of teaching and nursing. Others worked in the Public Service, in stores, as domestics, or seamstresses. There were very few female doctors. By 1956, with the advent of the People’s National Movement, large numbers of women, particularly of the middle and lower socio-economic groups, went to the University of Woodford Square to receive their political education from Dr. Williams. They got caught up in the excitement of the period and many of them became some of the most loyal and hardworking members of the People’s National Movement.73 However, despite their visibility in the 1956 elections, notably as platform speakers, women’s equality in the movement was neither promised nor achieved—for, as Rhoda Reddock notes, the electoral slate of twenty-four PNM candidates included no women.74 Rogers and TECA were also associated with a loosely organized entity from “Behind the Bridge,” an area with a dissident subculture close to Woodford Square. This aggregation of “pariah intellectuals”—or “limers” in Trinbagonian parlance—or individuals engaged in “shooting the breeze,” to use the American inner-city term, may not have had much formal education, but their experiences enabled them to have meaningful insights about their lifeworld. In the Behind the Bridge area, these students of Williams’s lectures could be found hanging about the barber shops and rum shops, on street corners, and in the “pan yards” where much steel band music was conceived and played, and as part of the intellectual activity that goes into the preparation of costumes for Carnival. From these various locations, they would migrate to the larger space of Woodford Square to receive the knowledge that Williams was willingly imparting. In his speech of June 21, 1955, titled “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943–1955,” Williams detailed his experiences and his dismissal from the commission; this was his first public declaration of his transition from public intellectual to social movement intellectual in the cause of political independence. In his opening remarks, Williams stated: I stand before you tonight, and, therefore, before the people of the British West Indies, the representative of a principle, a cause, and a defeat. The principle is the principle of intellectual freedom. The cause

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is the cause of the West Indian people. The defeat is the defeat of the policy of not appointing local men to high office.75 Clearly Williams was not only stating his vigorous opposition to the commission’s restrictive policies on the mobility and knowledge production of qualified West Indians like himself, he was also warning that this could be the fate of other similarly qualified West Indians. Significantly, he also informed his listeners that despite the difficulties he experienced with the commission, he maintained his employment there because it brought him into “close contact with present problems in territories, the study of whose history has been the principal purpose of my adult life, while association with representatives of the metropolitan governments enabled me to understand, as I could not otherwise have understood, the mess in which the West Indies find themselves today.” And, in a statement indicating that the “rules of the game” regarding the production and dissemination of knowledge would change, he noted that he would “let [my] bucket right down here in Trinidad, and the only University in which I will lecture in the future is the University of Woodford Square.”76 By the time Williams gave his “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission” speech—and consequent on the Behind the Bridge mobilizing efforts of Rogers and Donaldson, the “two teacher friends” to whom Williams referred—a culture of argumentative debate had already been put in place. This allowed Williams to educate the thousands who showed up for his lectures about the dynamics of colonialism and anticolonialism under the auspices of the PEM and thus create a “Great Public.” By the time he delivered his other four lectures in the series, under similar sponsorship and later publication by TECA, the tenor of the Behind the Bridge discussions had transformed from cricket to the condition of the oppressed. Furthermore, Williams had been transformed from the “mystery” inhabitant of Kent House to, in the words of one observer, the man who “taught me more about myself in one night than I knew in my whole lifetime. I dey wid him.”77 During the first of the four lectures, titled “Economic Problems of Trinidad and Tobago,” delivered on July 5, 1955, Williams maintained that the key to economic development lay in stimulating the modern sectors of the economy so as to provide jobs for workers in the more labor-intensive and declining industries such as sugar. The most favorable industries holding out the prospect for greater development were tourism, which would involve development of an infrastructure to facilitate international trade, and the

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production of consumable goods such as hosiery, leather garments, footwear, china, paper, glass, and building materials. In keeping with the “industrialization by invitation” approach of the Saint Lucian–born Nobel laureate Sir Arthur Lewis, Williams emphasized the need to produce for export rather than for the limited domestic market and the necessity for the British Caribbean territories to be united in a customs union. However, since industrialization was a costly business and beyond the means of Caribbean governments, Williams felt: The programme should be based on appeals and incentives to established manufacturers in England and the United States who are already selling to Latin America. But, since investors are likely driven by the profit motive and will only start a business on that basis, it may be in the national interest for the government to intervene and start a business that at the beginning is unprofitable.78 Williams’s second address of this series was titled “Constitution Reform in Trinidad and Tobago,” delivered on July 19, 1955. Here he proposed (1) the abolition of the single-chamber Legislative Council; (2) a lower house of elected members; (3) a second chamber of sixteen nominated members; and (4) the majority leader of the House to be appointed by the governor and the chief minister. For Williams, constitutional reform would reduce the power of the governor in favor of an elected group of legislators within which the role of the chief minister would be paramount and business and religious leaders would be included.79 “The Historical Background of Race Relations in the Caribbean” was Williams’s third lecture in the series, delivered on August 16, 1955, and was the vehicle through which he argued that the origin of Negro slavery by Britain was economic, not racial. Race, he contended initially, had nothing to do with the color of the laborer but had to do with the cheapness of that labor.80 After unsuccessful efforts to enslave North American Indians, European whites were recruited as a deliberate governmental policy. These white immigrants fell into three categories: indentured servants, “redemptioners,” and convicts, each to serve for a specified period of time. It was only after planters found Negro labor to be cheaper and more readily available that a deliberate Negro slavery policy was instituted and the racial stereotype was superimposed on the economic base. Imperialism then justified this view or perception by regarding the colonial peoples as inferior, despising their personal habits and social customs, denying their fitness

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to govern themselves, and describing them as “a people without a history.”81 Thus the servitude of the African and the indenture of the Asiatic were based on the hypothesis, either expressed or understood, that the degradation of the laborer was essential to the plantation structure, specifically in regard to sugar cultivation. Williams illustrates this form of what movement analysts call “frame bridging,”82 whereby two components of colonialism—race and education—are linked as a means of interpreting colonial oppression, with the words of one planter in 1926: Give [the Negroes] some education in the way of reading and writing, but no more. Even then I would say educate only the bright ones; not the whole mass. If you educate the whole mass of the agricultural population, you will be deliberately ruining the country. Give the bright ones a chance to win as many scholarships as they can; give the others three hours’ education a day. . . . If you keep them longer you will never get them back to work in the fields. If you want agricultural labourers and not dissatisfaction, you must keep them longer.83 Finally, in the fourth speech, “The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago,” delivered on September 13, 1955, and also published as a PEM pamphlet, Williams attacked the existing political system and stressed the need for meaningful party politics that would inherently involve a viable opposition. He also issued a trenchant criticism of the sitting government of Trinidad and Tobago, the cronyism and favoritism practiced by its ministers, and the lavish promises made by political candidates during the 1950 elections.84 In outlining his case for party politics, he therefore emphasized—as had the PEM—the importance of political education as part of his nationalist vision. He felt the entire Trinbagonian political structure needed to be accompanied by honesty, transparency, incorruptibility, and adherence to the general principles of democracy in government, especially through the role of the individual—to use the Greek notion that “every cook can govern.” In addition, Williams took the opportunity to announce the intention to form a new party that “should be openly the party of inexperience, inexperience in corruption, inexperience in [m]isgovernment, inexperience in changing our views and decisions, inexperience in the determination to exclude reason and good sense from the conduct of public affairs.”85 Williams also attacked fraud and demanded the creation of an enlightened and alert “Opposition,” which should be “the organized expression of that overwhelming public opinion which [was] so flagrantly disregarded in prolonging the life

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of the present Legislative Council [and which] must be organized into an effective political party,” rather than through the thoughts or philanthropic endeavors of one man. Furthermore, to combat fraud, Williams felt that every member of Parliament should make a declaration when accepting consideration of a bill in which its constituents had neither local nor personal interest, and that the member accepted the importance of party discipline.86 With his eye to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge, Williams stated that he conceived of the PNM not merely as a “vast educational agency” but as one equipped with “an important research department.” Data from this source would then be presented in “simple language and an attractive manner to the people to encourage them to form their opinions” with a “party newspaper, party information leaflets and newsletters, [and] party pamphlets” designed to serve as a basis for intraparty group discussion. This was at once a recognition of the notion that to “educate is to emancipate,” as well as the liberatory nature of the knowledge he was transmitting.87 Williams also addressed what he considered to be the principal source or “Hydra head” of colonialism in Trinidad: the American presence at the Chaguaramas base in northern Trinidad.88 The Hydra was the mythological Greek monster with multiple heads, each capable of regenerating after being severed, not destroyed until the team of Heracles and Iolaus severed and cauterized each head one by one.89 Williams’s analogy was apt. The location of the base was the result of the Leased-Bases Agreement of 1941 between the governments of Great Britain and the United States, in which the people of Trinidad and Tobago were not consulted. The agreement awarded the Americans a ninety-nine-year lease on the Chaguaramas peninsula in exchange for “50 over-age destroyers,” which, if sold in 1930, would have fetched a price between $263,000 and $340,000.90 The terms of the agreement stated that the US government would accept “no obligation, no commitment, no alliance, [and could] abandon its undertaking whenever it pleased them to do so with or without consent.”91 From its inception, the presence of the base was a source of friction: it was located on a space formerly occupied by local residents, many of whom were small farmers and fisherfolk evicted from other places, as well as some of the island’s more well-to-do citizens who had built weekend homes and a hotel near the most attractive and accessible bathing beaches. After the agreement was signed, boat owners had to obtain passes to moor their boats on the Trinidad side of Staubles Bay, putting them at the mercy of the base’s station commander and making them subject to arbitrary US military patrol inspections. This led to frequent petty incidents between US military personnel

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and Trinidadians, who felt angry and humiliated at now having to request passes, stop at the entrance of the station, and adhere to the thirty-mile-perhour speed limit on pain of losing the privilege of transiting the base. When the issue of where to situate the federal West Indian capital was raised at the 1957 Standing Federation Committee conference in Jamaica, a subcommittee recommended Chaguaramas. The United States subsequently submitted a memorandum outlining its opposition to cede Chaguaramas either wholly or partially; the US ambassador to London noted that the base was still needed for security purposes, expressing the hope that those at the conference could “equally appreciate our grave concern to retain the location which best assures the ability to defend the strategically vital Caribbean Area. The provision of the best defense is important not only to the U.S., but to your Federation, and to the United Kingdom.”92 Since space won is space to be defended, the United States adopted a twofold strategy of refusing to discuss the matter and attacking Williams, who had made it clear that the presence of the base was incompatible with Trinbagonian nationalism. As US consul general Walter Orebaugh put it since: “The [Williams] problem could not be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, it had become necessary to review our position, assess our strength in the area, and get down to cases” and decide what could be done to get rid of Williams.93 With the US refusal to negotiate the matter, Williams sought to locate the issue in the public sphere by moving it from the periphery to the center for critical discussion. In particular, he used the University of Woodford Square as a physical space for his spoken opposition and the pages of the PNM newspaper for his written opposition to the base’s presence. In the process, he educated his fellow Trinbagonians by delineating a history of the base within the context of US imperialism or, perhaps more accurately, through the Bachacs’ tactic of nibbling away at the US presence or by the strategy of “death by a thousand cuts.” First, Williams made an expedient volte-face from a preelection promise to honor all international obligations.94 In prefacing his explanation regarding this change of mind, he noted that the Chaguaramas issue “represented the most important and the most dramatic manifestation of the problem of a Caribbean Economic Community, with particular reference to the question of ‘foreignism,’ to use a beautiful word which appeared in a letter from a correspondent to me this morning.”95 Next he railed against the US presence in Trinidad at the Macqueripe Club. In an address at Woodford Square on July 3, 1959, Williams explained

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that the agreement allowed the US government to operate service clubs like Macqueripe, which were limited to base personnel. Instead the club had become one of Trinidad’s most exclusive nightspots, in which only a privileged few Trinidadians were allowed to enter.96 This hint at the possible disloyalty of fellow Trinidadians, it turned out, was sufficient to create angst on the part of the local elite. This forced Macqueripe to limit its membership to base personnel. Another nibble was Williams’s apocryphal April 1957 announcement at a party speech that “he had substantial information of Radiation being used by the Americans at Chaguaramas.”97 Continuing to use “every possible artifice to keep the Chaguaramas issue alive and before the public,” the PNM produced an article in the May 26, 1958, issue of PNM Weekly in which party treasurer A. N. R. Robinson alleged that an appointment of a joint commission “was intended to be merely a stage in the negotiations between the parties.” Therefore he warned: “‘Remember Chaguaramas’ may well become a fixture in future dealings between the West Indies and the U.K. and the USA.”98 Another attack on the Chaguaramas presence arose when the United States requested to use Piarco Airport for its military aircraft. John O’Halloran, PNM minister of industry and commerce, flatly rejected the proposal because the additional costs brought about by the airport’s heavy use would be solely borne by the government of Trinidad and Tobago.99 Moreover, the British secretary of state for the colonies had waived the Piarco landing fees for US aircraft without consultation with or consent from the current PNM government; this, O’Halloran stated, was a repetition of the fundamental action of the 1940 agreement that had excluded input from Trinbagonians. O’Halloran contended that Trinidad and Tobago’s new government could no longer “accept any arrangement in 1960 representing the outcome of protracted negotiations from which it was excluded and designed to regularize a long standing practice on which it was never consulted.”100 As a result, the PNM-majority legislature imposed a ban on the landing of US airplanes at Piarco airport effective April 30, 1960. Williams held that two Trinidads now existed: one that granted privileges to US policy and personnel, and one that permitted disadvantage toward Trinbagonians. Getting to the heart of the matter, Edwin Moline, the new US consul general, observed: Nationalism in the West Indies wishes its recognition. West Indian awareness of United States base policies in other parts of the world is

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informed and discerning. The West Indian nationalist—and all politicians are nationalists in the West Indies—cannot accept that standards applicable in other parts of the world are less than acceptable in his bailiwick. West Indians striving for national identity, and Indian sensitivity to a slight, contribute to this desire for “most favored nation” treatment in the issue under consideration. . . . The oft-expressed desire for “modernization” of the 1941 Agreement has a solid foundation and cannot be shaken. Even those most sympathetic to the United States concede such a need and they hope for its achievement through the maximum of statesmanship on both sides.101 Williams purposely sought to detach the truth from the power of US hegemony and to place it into the public sphere by his dissemination of historical knowledge. At a massive rally on April 22, 1960, which saw an estimated attendance of 10,000 to 35,000 participating in and making history, PNM lady vice-chairperson Isabel Teshea delivered copies of a memorandum, known as “The Memorial,” to Moline and the governor general with a request that it be forwarded to Her Majesty’s government. The Memorial demanded full internal self-government for Trinidad and Tobago, an independent federation, revision of the base agreement, the US return of Chaguaramas to Trinidad, and finally the inalienable and imprescriptible right of Trinbagonians to decide their destiny. The Memorial also described the agreement as “the most deadly menace that has yet appeared to Trinidad’s material interests.”102 Then, during a number of meetings from November 22 to December 9, 1960, involving governmental representatives of Great Britain, the United States, and Trinidad and Tobago, the United States agreed to a phased withdrawal from the base to be completed by the end of 1977, as well as to participation in supportive projects such as the construction of the University of the West Indies (UWI) College of Arts and Sciences at St. Augustine, equipped with a suitably endowed library.103 Williams described these events and their connection to Trinbagonian political independence thus: We learned from all this that we had to depend on our own resources. . . . Our tremendous April 22nd 1960 demonstration demonstrated to us and the world how extensive these resources were, it made it impossible to deny the PNM claim for renegotiation of the Treaty. And it laid the foundation for West Indian independent nationhood, in theory if not in practice. For by April 22nd 1960, the British Government,

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which in 1957 had never even given a thought to the possibility of West Indian independence, was more anxious than the federal politicians or anybody in the West Indies except the PNM to give the West Indies independence. They wanted to join the European Common Market, and one essential step in the process was to rid themselves of the West Indian millstones round their neck. . . . But independence could not be achieved without a settlement of outstanding international issues involving the traditional obligation of an emerging country to accept existing international commitments. The PNM made it clear that it was not accepting the 1941 Agreement and that that Agreement had to be renegotiated.104 Finally, in his “Independence Day” address of August 31, 1962, which took the form of a broadcast to the nation, Williams firmly rejected the veiled accusations of PNM communism and articulated what he meant by “the best in democratic theory.” He argued that the first responsibility of the people of Trinidad and Tobago was “the protection and promotion of . . . democracy,” which meant more than mere universal adult suffrage. Rather, democracy also meant recognition of the rights of others, equality of opportunity, protection of the weak against the strong, protection of citizens from the arbitrary exercise of power, and, finally, freedom of worship, expression, and assembly.105 concLusion

This essay has addressed two major points: first, what is an intellectual conceptually; and second, how the political independence movement in Trinidad and Tobago provided the basis for Williams’s emergence as a social movement intellectual, particularly from the standpoint of generating new knowledge. This concept was illustrated through Williams’s webbed relationships with various “biographical others”; social movement theories that focused on using resources to mobilize prospective collective action participants; discussion about how a social movement lends itself to the emergence of intellectuals who then produce knowledge; and what intellectual activity entails. In addition, Williams’s biography, especially his transformative experiences, is important in understanding his thought as an intellectual, what resources he used and their hierarchization, and the nature of his interaction with both his followers and the colonial authorities.

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Williams made space for his thought both as an academic intellectual before returning to Trinidad in 1948 and as a public intellectual soon afterward. He combined these two roles to become a social movement intellectual through his publications and speeches; his association with the Bachacs, TECA, PEG, and the PNM; and his efforts to involve a new group of people, the Behind the Bridge segment of Trinidadian society, in the national discussion. PEG could be described as a submerged network that operated in secret to support the activities of Williams and key members of the movement. These activities were facilitated by a colonial POS that restricted opportunities for upward mobility for darker-skinned Trinidadians, did not involve universal adult suffrage, and was hostile to anything resembling communism and socialism, but yet provided opportunities to obtain various experiences, including education, that were not commensurately associated with just rewards. It is a cardinal feature of colonial oppression that proponents of that condition never appear to understand why colonial subjects like Williams, who seemingly derive the most from the system, are the ones most likely to lead a collective reaction against it. The knowledge generated by Williams was the product of a variety of specific resources he used to mobilize and educate, such as time, frames, energy, expert knowledge, open squares, microphones, and so on. The use of these resources enabled Trinidadians to understand the tools of colonialism: the economic exploitation, restriction of political activity, and an educational diet that was inimical to the interests of Trinbagonians but favored those of the colonizer. That the history of precolonial Trinbagonians was considered by the British as “old papers,” and therefore justifiably destroyable, led Williams to assert that “colonial nationalism was built on imperialist vandalism.”106 It was these circumstances that led to a systematically enunciated ideology that detailed what the issue was, who was responsible, and how the problem should be remedied, which Williams then moved from the periphery to the center during his lectures at the University of Woodford Square and, later, through the printed word in the PNM Weekly and the Nation. This also enabled Williams to introduce a new form of charismatic authority that was eventually routinized with the emergence of the PNM. In disseminating his knowledge, either verbally or in written form, Williams was subject to criticism, both destructive and constructive, as intellectuals often are. Thus he equipped himself with a personality that accepted the inevitability of criticism, reflected on it, considered amending his actions and ideas, yet nonetheless went forward with dispensation of his knowledge. To

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be sure, the attendant criticism may have enhanced his intellectual reputation, further buttressing his status, especially and ironically as a charismatic figure. Indeed, Capitalism and Slavery had generated much scholarly attention and, according to the historian Hilary Beckles, was the inspiration for the political economy and UWI’s plantation schools of thought.107 Williams’s later academic endeavors were also the subject of much criticism, and his politics were exposed to equally searching examination.108 But it would be naive to conclude that he took it in stride and did not allow it to color his judgments and policies or affect his relationships with various biographical others. In the final analysis, Williams was the quintessential Caribbean man, the driving force and major intellectual inspiration behind the movement for political independence, a major academic intellectual, and, as the imbrication of biography and history reveals, a creature of a generation that was preoccupied with the ills of colonialism. noTes 1. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. 2. The data used in this essay were garnered from the Eric Williams Memorial Collection located in the University of the West Indies in Trinidad (EWMC); the National Archives London Colonial Office (CO); National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland, often taken from Record Group 59 (RG 59); and various secondary sources. 3. Goffman, Stigma, 62–66. 4. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 2. 5. See Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; McCarthy and Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements.” 6. Eyerman and Jamison, Social Movements. 7. Eisenstadt, “Intellectuals and Tradition,” 1. 8. Goulbourne, “Institutional Contribution,” 21. 9. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 132–33. 10. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 11. Flacks, “Making History and Making Theory,” 3. 12. Williams, Inward Hunger, 26. 13. Ibid., 38. 14. Campbell, “Education and Black Consciousness,” 36. 15. Ibid. 16. Williams, Inward Hunger, 37. 17. Williams, “Chap. II, 1911–1922,” EWMC, 139. 18. Williams was not opposed to the existence of these subjects in the curriculum; he later pointed out that his knowledge of Latin was extremely useful during his first year at Oxford University, as was a working knowledge of French and Spanish in his historical research.

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19. Williams, Inward Hunger, 35. 20. Williams, “Chap. II, 1911–1922,” EWMC. 21. Williams, Inward Hunger, 38. 22. Williams, “Chap. II, 1911–1922,” EWMC. It should be noted that public whipping and its unhappy companion, public humiliation, were also practiced at other leading secondary schools in the West Indies. 23. Ibid. 24. See C. L. R. James, The Case for West Indian Self-Government and A Convention Appraisal. These are perceptive treatments of the various social forces, both at home and abroad, that conspired to produce Williams the independence leader and scholar-politician. 25. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 2. 26. Williams, Inward Hunger, 34. 27. Ibid., 46–47. 28. Ibid.,47. 29. Ibid., 42. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 45. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Munro and Sander, Kas-Kas, 36. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 36–37. 36. Williams, Inward Hunger, 57. 37. Heywood, “Eric Williams: The Howard Years,” 19. 38. Palmer, introduction to Capitalism and Slavery, xxi. 39. For a complete statement, see Williams’s The British West Indian University, a memorandum he prepared for the Committee on Higher Education in the West Indies. For a truncated version of this text, see his “The Idea of a British West Indian University” (published in both the Harvard Educational Review [May 1945], and Phylon [1946]), in which he addresses three main considerations: (1) a university is not a mere collection of college faculties and students but an expression of the social order in which it functions; (2) the British West Indian university should create an intellectual climate of the methods, aims, and purposes of the modern world adapted to the British West Indies; and (3) such an institution should be independent of internal political pressures and external pressures of other universities. 40. Williams, “The Idea of a British West Indian University,” Phylon, 147–56. 41. Ibid. 42. Williams, Education in the British West Indies, xi. 43. Franklin, “Eric Williams and Howard University,” 27. 44. Martin, “Eric Williams: His Radical Side in the Early 1940s,” 107–19. 45. Szacki, “Intellectuals between Politics and Culture,” 231–32. 46. The term “lifeworld” emerged in the 1940s and is defined as the “the sum total of physical surroundings and everyday experiences that make up an individual’s world.” MerriamWebster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lifeworld. For example, Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 124. 47. Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power, 104.

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48. For a statement regarding Williams’s tenure at the commission, see his “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission,” in Cudjoe, Eric E. Williams Speaks, 112.; and chap. 9 of Inward Hunger. 49. Williams, “Chap. II, 1911–1922,” EWMC; Inward Hunger, 113. 50. “From James Frederick Green, Acting Chief, Division of Dependent Affairs to Ward M. Canaday,” NARA. 51. Ibid. 52. See “Background Information on the Caribbean Commission, by Mr. Mackay,” NARA. 53. Williams, Inward Hunger, 113. 54. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 53. 55. St. Pierre, Anatomy of Resistance, 6. 56. For more information on these elections, see “Governor Rance to Secretary of State for the Colonies”; “General Election: Rance to Secretary of State for the Colonies,” CO. 57. “Activities of Uriah Butler,” CO. A confidential letter from governor H. E. Rance to S. E. V. Luke, Esq., which sought to rationalize Butler’s “anti-British talk” in an attempt to recover lost ground politically. 58. “Shaw to Creech-Jones,” CO. 59. “Creech-Jones to Shaw,” CO. 60. Ibid. 61. “Note on Mr. Albert Gomes, Trinidad Minister of Labour, Industry and Commerce,” CO. 62. “The PNM Restates Its Fundamental Principles.” 63. Williams, “The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago.” 64. For more information, see “Extract from Trinidad Dispatch,” CO. 65. Williams, Inward Hunger, 150; “The PNM Restates Its Fundamental Principles.” 66. See “Carlton Comma to Williams”; Williams, “My Dear Carlton”; both in EWMC. 67. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 144; Morris, 139; Robnett, How Long? 26. 68. W. Mahabir, In and Out of Politics, 17. 69. De Wilton Rogers, The Rise of the People’s National Movement (Trinidad and Tobago: n.p., n.d.), 29. 70. Ibid., 2 71. See W. J. Alexander, “Birth of the PNM.” 72. Williams, Education in the British West Indies, 90. Noteworthy is that the book’s introduction was written by De Wilton Rogers, director general of TECA, Trinidad. 73. Gordon, “Oral Reminiscences,” 151. 74. Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, 306. 75. Williams, “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission,” in Cudjoe, Eric E. Williams Speaks, 112. 76. Ibid. 77. Rogers, The Rise of the People’s National Movement, 43. 78. Williams, “Some Economic Problems of Trinidad and Tobago.” 79. Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 129.

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80. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 19. 81. Williams, “The Historical Background of Race Relations in the Caribbean.” 82. Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes,” 238. 83. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean, 72–73. Williams is quoting here from the 1926 “Report of Select Committee of the Legislative Council on Restriction of Hours of Labour,” 30–31. 84. Williams, “The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago.” 85. Williams, “To My Dear Mr. Manley,” in “Chap. II, 1911–1922,” EWMC. 86. Williams, “The Case for Party Politics.” 87. Ibid. 88. Williams, “The Approach to Independence.” 89. “Hydra,” Encyclopedia Mythica, http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/hydra.html. 90. See “The U.S. Leased Areas in Trinidad and Tobago,” NARA. 91. “Chaguaramas Joint Commission Report,” NARA. 92. “London Conference on West Indies Federal Capital Site,” NARA. 93. “Orebaugh to Willoughby, Dale, Swihart,” NARA. 94. In a lecture he delivered at the University of Woodford Square on June 14, 1956, which sought to allay suspicions that the PNM was neither “subversive” nor sought to “threaten political stability” in Trinidad and Tobago, Williams stated “categorically that [the PNM] will honour all international obligations, both economic and military, and especially the defence arrangements with the United States of America.” See “The PNM Restates Its Fundamental Principles.” 95. See “Reflections on the Caribbean Economic Community,” 9. 96. “Orebaugh to Secretary of State,” NARA. 97. W. Mahabir, In and Out of Politics, 83. 98. “Orebaugh to the Department of State,” NARA. 99. “Trinidad Turns Down U.S. Deal on Piarco,” cols. 2146–52. 100. Ibid. 101. “The West Indies and Revision of the 1941 Leased-Bases Agreement,” NARA. 102. Felix, “Ten Years of the PNM,” 17. 103. Williams would later reveal that the Tobago Conference nearly broke down over this provision owing to a serious split between the head of the American delegation, who agreed with the proposal, and the State Department delegate, who demurred but was overruled by Washington. See “Reflections on the Caribbean Economic Community,” 10–11. 104. Ibid., 10. 105. Cudjoe, Eric E. Williams Speaks, 266. 106. Williams, Inward Hunger, 95. 107. See Beckles, “The Williams Effect.” That the entire book contains essays on various facets of Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery is ample testimony to the enduring influence of his scholarly work. 108. See, e.g., Goveia, “New Shibboleths for the Old,” 48–54; Laurence, “Colonialism in Trinidad and Tobago,” 44–56; Rohlehr, “History as Absurdity,” 69–108; Best, “The Movement Leadership vs. Prophecy”; Sutton, “The Historian as Politician,” 98–114.

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Part ii

PoLiTicaL WiLLiams

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chapter 3

“We inTegraTe or We Perish” eric Williams, forbes Burnham, and the regional integration movement ceciLia mcaLmonT

It was relatively early in the existence of her New World colonial empire that Great Britain began attempting to forge a closer union among her geographically dispersed colonies to achieve administrative efficiency and economy. As early as the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Britain attempted to form a federation of the Leeward Islands, but jealousy among the members of the legislatures involved soon paralyzed that attempt. The economic decline during the latter half of the century prompted a rather more substantial attempt at federation of the Leeward Islands in 1871. Despite its unpopularity, the idea for federation managed to survive until the eve of the infamous Barbados Confederation Riots in 1876, which ended the attempt to join Barbados with the Windward Islands. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the emerging political and trade union leaders did not at first favor federation. However, in the aftermath of the widespread riots in the region during the mid-1930s, the leaders chafed under the restrictions of the Crown Colony government, which had failed to deliver on its promises of social, economic, and political improvement. It was with the acquisition of self-government or, even better, political independence that these goals could be achieved. Yet the island leaders were aware that, due to their small size, Great Britain would be more likely to consider the idea of self-rule under the auspices of federation. These leaders had as their examples the political federation of Britain’s larger colonies, Canada and Australia. In the years after World War II, Britain was anxious to rid herself of her burdensome Caribbean colonies and pass hegemony to the United States. Consequently, bolstered by a consensus among the West Indian leaders, Great Britain summoned a series of conferences that culminated in the West Indies Federation of 1958. Yet this was the idea’s only success, for soon the island nations themselves would fail to agree. 75

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3.1 The flag of the ill-fated federation of ten Anglophone Caribbean territories. Photograph courtesy of the University of the West Indies Alma Jordan Library.

Eric Williams played an important role in the federation debacle. Indeed, Williams’s political career as a leader of a government party coincided with the birth of the federation. Forbes Burnham then entered the regional integration scene shortly after he became premier of Guyana in 1964. The two men had contrasting personalities. Williams was an introvert, reclusive—almost secretive—but an original thinker. Burnham was a natural extrovert, full of bonhomie, a doer, and a superb orator. But they had several things in common. Their characters were fashioned of the same clay, that is, of the elitist British education they received a decade apart but during the time between world wars, a period of political and intellectual ferment that transformed Great Britain. Williams was a historian, an academic, and a teacher. Burnham, though a lawyer by training, also possessed a sense of history and likewise understood the impact of colonialism’s legacy on the Caribbean man. Consequently both men resented this psychological thralldom and saw regional integration as a means of breaking it; yet they gloried in what they had achieved under colonialism’s tutelage. This stood as a contradiction, one that played itself out in the very mechanisms they supported in an effort to achieve regional integration. They accepted, with little modification, the paradigms, theories, and models of integration designed by and for their

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exploiters as a means of achieving integration among the exploited. They also roundly condemned the regional characteristics of fragmentation, insularity, individualism, and parochialism that hampered integration’s progress. Yet Williams and Burnham seemed ignorant that, as Caribbean men themselves, they were nurtured in, and were products of, that same environment. Their denial of this personal legacy stands as one of the main weaknesses in their attempts to forge regional integration with their neighboring island governments. What Williams and Burnham had in common, too, was the broader concept of what constituted the Caribbean region. They were both pragmatists, and the role they played in the regional integration process was determined by the different political realities of their individual circumstances. Both men have been praised for their vision in conceptualizing and supporting integration. However, consideration of recent and earlier assessments of these instruments reveals that, despite their avowed commitment, Williams and Burnham played a major role in creating a set of handicapped children. The last surviving sibling, the common market of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), was in fact abandoned in its toddlerhood and virtually had to fend for itself for seven years. It is within this context that this essay examines the contribution, impact, and legacy of Eric Williams and Forbes Burnham on the regional integration movement. The essay is divided into five sections. The first section explores Williams’s role in the West Indies Federation and the factors that handicapped it. The second section addresses the significance of the Conferences of Heads of Government. The third section explores the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA) and Williams’s and Burnham’s motives for its establishment. The fourth section discusses CARICOM and the roles of Williams and Burnham through the light of several assessments. Finally, the fifth section addresses the hiatus years and their impact on CARICOM, as well as on the legacy of Williams and Burnham to Caribbean integration. The WesT indies federaTion

The West Indies Federation can be regarded as the first of the three challenged infants born in the pursuit of regional integration during the twentieth century. Its first significant handicap was that its framers were not local politicians but rather the expatriate representatives of the mother country who had an extremely narrow view of federation. According to Gordon

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Lewis, Britain “saw the West Indies leaders as, primarily, Her Majesty’s Ministers overseas and not as a vanguard of West Indian regional nationalism.”1 This idea explains why Mother England “invested the office of GovernorGeneral, not that of the Prime Minister, with most of the panoply of the federal power,”2 a concept Williams protested most vigorously. That this was a political federation, one that tried to encompass several different levels of economic integration, was its second handicap.3 The framers were faced with the inherent problems of ensuring freedom of movement and free movement of goods, as well as a customs union and federal taxation. Most of these matters were left, in typical West Indian style, to be dealt with later. Williams described the birth of the federation thus: “The infant nation was presented to the world in swaddling clothes made in the United States of America out of the made-in-Britain shroud of colonialism.”4 Williams supported what he knew to be a handicapped instrument precisely because he saw federation as the means whereby the shackles of colonialism, which held the psyche of the Caribbean people in thrall, could be broken.5 Additionally, Williams realized that the islands had a long history of insularity, which was rooted in the development of its economy and trade. He envisaged that integration through federation would help to counteract the legacy of fragmentation and parochialism.6 He also realized that the ultimate goal of independence could only be achieved at that stage through the acceptance of federation. Over the next two years, he tried to introduce the modifications he felt would make the federation a more fitting instrument for integration. But his attempts soon brought conflicting perceptions of federation to the fore and with them the insular jealousies and rivalries he hoped federation would cure. The federal infant was being suffocated by the very ideas it was born to eradicate. In the end, it was this insularity and the selfish pursuit of individual national interests that led Jamaica to withdraw from the federation first, with Trinidad and Tobago following soon thereafter, leading to federation’s demise. Thomas Gittens states the point well: [Federation] failed not just because the leaders of the separate units were too nationalistic or insular, but more intrinsically because their insularism was so strong as to totally emasculate the institution and powers of Federation to render it incapable of surviving.7 In the end, therefore, it was the neglect of the infant while its parents squabbled over its development as much as the American-made swaddling clothes

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and “British-made colonialist shroud” that smothered it.8 Like many undernourished children of the developing world today, as in the past, federation died before its fifth birthday. The role of Eric Williams in this debacle was an ambiguous one. He supported federation because he saw it as the means of achieving integration, but at the same time, he recognized its shortcomings as a mechanism for achieving integration. He aired his dissatisfaction about these defects and, when he was in a position to do so, tried to modify them. However, his own action of withdrawing Trinidad and Tobago from the federation emphasized that he was fashioned in the same mold and driven by the same jealousies of those he accused. The conferences of The heads of governmenT

The Heads of Government Conference (HGC) was one of the most important entities created in the pursuit of regional integration. It underlined the role of Williams as the leader and visionary figure of the integration movement, but it also institutionalized some of the weaknesses that continued to plague the movement. While still basking in the euphoria of leading his country into independence on the heels of the breakup of the federation, Williams was conscious of the truism that the best way to proceed after a disaster was to immediately get back into the fray. He was ready with another proposal to move the integration process forward. Again, herein lay the duality of strength and weakness. Williams clearly did not spend enough time examining the lessons learned from the failure of the federation. He—or the other Caribbean leaders, for that matter—had not afforded himself enough time to reflect on their collective and individual roles in that failure; nor did they all examine what could be done to prevent a recurrence. They came to the table not with clear, open minds but with the bulging baggage of the past. The tactic was to be different this time. It would be a slow movement toward economic cooperation, at the same time giving Williams the opportunity to incorporate his wider vision of the Caribbean region. Williams invited his colleagues to attend what turned out to be the first meeting of the HGC to discuss the creation of Caribbean community. This group was to include the ten remaining British units of the federation, the three Guianas, and all the islands of the Caribbean Sea, both independent and not independent. An invitation to non-British Caribbean countries was to be extended as soon as possible, but not to all: the republics of Cuba, Haiti, and

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the Dominican Republic were to be left out. Indeed, over the years, Williams would continually change his definition of a “wider Caribbean.” It was a difference in the perception of federation that led to the confrontation between Trinidad and Jamaica. Similarly, in those early years, perception of the scope and purpose of the HGC again led to confrontation between the leaders of the two countries. Williams himself stated that the first two conferences had gone well, but the third was anticlimactic and “did nothing to restore the Conference to such status and potential as it undoubtedly had in the first instance.”9 While it was Williams’s idea to use the HGC to resuscitate the integration process, it was also his actions that stymied the process. Forbes Burnham hosted the third conference. He had succeeded Cheddi Jagan as premier of British Guiana in 1964, a man whose opposition to joining the West Indies Federation was well known. The backstory is this: in 1956, Williams had passionately argued that the solution to the Caribbean’s problems of overpopulation and migration was to include British Honduras and British Guiana in the federation. He believed that British Guiana was essential to the economic development of the British Caribbean, and without that colony’s wealth, federation “would be no more than a federation of legislators as it once was of lunatics.”10 As a member of British Guiana’s legislature in 1958, Burnham had agreed and had argued with equal passion—but to no avail—that the colony should join the federation, believing not only that it would derive tremendous economic advantages but that federation would be the means whereby British Guiana would gain independence.11 When Williams persuaded Errol Barrow, then prime minister of Barbados, to invite Burnham to host the third conference, he was well aware it would be in the hands of someone with close ties to several other heads and with whom he had had bitter confrontations, despite their common desire for federation. Yet Williams also realized he could then strategically retreat from the debate, knowing that the person to whom he had yielded shared his vision of a wider Caribbean federation. Burnham’s statement at the opening of the Conference confirmed this view: I shall merely content myself with inviting you to consider another stage of regional cooperation at economic and other levels. . . . We are on the Northern Territory of the South American continent and perhaps I am permitted to give you a little dream I have had for years and that is to get an even bigger community embracing all of these countries.12

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Burnham’s words assured Williams that there would always be some support among the heads for his vision of regional integration. During the ten years before the creation of CARICOM, the HGC continued to provide the main stimulus for regional integration. Many areas of functional cooperation, the main success story of the integration movement, had their genesis during this period. At the fifth conference, in 1967, the decision was made to establish the Commonwealth Caribbean Regional Secretariat in Georgetown. The 1969 conference witnessed the founding of the Caribbean Development Bank in Bridgetown, Barbados, and a year later the HGC voted to institute the Caribbean Broadcasting Union and the Caribbean Technical Assistance Programme. At the HGC’s seventh meeting in 1972, the Council of Legal Education and the Caribbean Education Council were both formed, as well as what should have been the first step toward full realization of the Williams-Burnham vision of Caribbean federation: inclusion of the non-British Caribbean nation-states in the integration process. It was at this meeting that Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago agreed to simultaneously establish diplomatic relations with the Republic of Cuba. Williams’s support of this decision was a volte-face of his previous stance, though as it turned out only a temporary one: his attitude toward Cuba continued to be ambivalent. It was in this year too that Guyana played host to the first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), Burnham’s brainchild. CARIFESTA brought together all the islands of the Caribbean, British and non-British, to showcase aspects of their individual and common cultures and colonial heritage. The joyous event was a first that literally and metaphorically united the diverse populations of the Caribbean. Among the most significant developments during this period was Williams’s dream of a free trade area—CARIFTA—in 1968 and, five years later, its extension into CARICOM. The process began in 1965 when three heads had agreed to formally establish CARIFTA via the Dickenson Bay Agreement, which sought to include as many Commonwealth Caribbean countries as possible; this act stood as the beginning of the Caribbean common market, realized over the ensuing years through a series of stages.13 Williams was not a signatory of the Dickenson Bay Agreement. That honor went to Barrow, Burnham, and Vere Bird of Antigua. But Williams’s shadow hovered prominently in the background, since he, along with Burnham, had signed the Georgetown Accord and the Treaty of Chaguaramas, which collectively established CARICOM, whose legacy, ten years afterward, underlined the vital importance of the HGC toward integration.

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carifTa

CARIFTA was meant to be an interim arrangement. Its economic (rather than political) focus maintained the vision that had inspired the first convention of the HGC. Christine Miller states that CARIFTA was to be the means of achieving true economic integration in the Caribbean because it was “an indigenous creation.”14 But this assessment proved to be incorrect; CARIFTA’s only indigenous characteristic was held within the men who proposed it. But it was these same men, with the same mind-set, who had been involved in the debacle of federation. CARIFTA was fashioned, with little modification, along the lines of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Because the developed countries of EFTA were basically at the same level of economic development, they were in a position to reap equitably the benefits associated with membership of a free trade area.15 On the other hand, while the member countries of CARIFTA were all underdeveloped, four Caribbean countries were more economically advanced than the other potential members: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados. This immediately raised one of the perennial questions of economic integration: how would the costs and benefits be shared? Herein lay the main handicap of this second attempt at regional integration. Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica had achieved a significant measure of modernization, and they possessed a comparative advantage in manufacturing over the others island nations, whose economies continued to follow the traditional monocultural pattern with minimal manufacturing.16 There were different perceptions between the two sets of countries about the benefits of integration and how quickly the benefits from CARIFTA would accrue. Consequently, discussions at CARIFTA council meetings were just as acrimonious as those regarding federation a decade earlier. Despite their protestations of breaking the shackles of colonialism and achieving economic independence, the now black and brown leaders of the region were again using the mechanisms of their white exploiters to achieve their own goals. While these leaders, especially Williams, were educating their people about their history to break the spell of the past, their own actions resulted from what Gittens describes as “the cultural values and responses instilled in them by the historical conditions under which they developed as a class.”17 James Millette illustrates well the handicaps of CARIFTA as the mechanism for achieving economic integration.18 He avers that, to ensure they were

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on the right track with respect to economic integration, the Caribbean leaders—particularly Williams and Burnham—had commissioned economists and technicians from the University of the West Indies to conduct several studies. One study recommended the highly viable alternative of “production integration” in lieu of the free trade model that was ultimately adopted.19 But the leaders ignored this approach, primarily for reasons of political survival, fear of loss of sovereignty, and worry that production integration would undermine their decision-making authority.20 The stated goal of economic integration was sacrificed on the altar of power, control, and status. Both Williams and Burnham constantly reiterated that although the economic benefits of CARIFTA were important, they supported its creation because of other equally important benefits to be derived from the association. One such significant benefit was the strength and stature the region could achieve by speaking with one voice to international audiences. Shridath Ramphal, the minister of external affairs of Guyana when CARIFTA came into force, stated that it was the Caribbean’s unity in CARIFTA that led to the inception of the African Caribbean Pacific grouping (ACP) and, eventually, the Lomé Convention’s free trade agreement. Moreover, regional unity in CARIFTA allowed the Caribbean not only to forge a clear strategy for negotiating with Europe but also to play a role in the creation of the ACP.21 Others, however, saw the motives of Williams—and especially of Burnham—in mainly political terms. Miller, for example, conjectures that Guyana simply needed regional support for a government system opposed by Britain and the United States.22 Clive Thomas opines that the Guyanese government was anxious to improve its political position and legitimize its US-backed seizure of independence.23 Williams was also accused of supporting CARIFTA for political motives. Vaughn Lewis states that, in the wake of the February 1970 Black Power revolt in Trinidad and Tobago, Williams probably felt some political insecurity for the first time. This was compounded by a new sense of economic insecurity as foreign currency reserves diminished and Trinidad and Tobago’s economy seemed to be in decline. The perceived danger ahead caused the Trinidad and Tobago government to actively pursue and support the politics of regional economic integration, that is, CARIFTA, as it could provide a wider base for reorganizing the national economy.24 But the framers of CARIFTA had been warned of this; they had been informed before its establishment that, even as a temporary measure, CARIFTA would be woefully deficient as an instrument for forging economic integration. They were presented with the more viable alternative of production

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integration but ignored it deliberately. CARIFTA was consciously chosen because strength and prestige would be garnered from acting as a united group, and more importantly, it did not restrict the framers’ individual authority. Instead CARIFTA helped to satisfy the men’s current political needs and ensured that its individual members would get as many benefits and as few losses as possible. Here was the main handicap of CARIFTA: the structural deficiencies of the underdeveloped economies of the Caribbean countries in general, and the unequal development between them, contributed to the inability of the relatively less-developed countries to reap equitable benefits. The situation was not helped by the provisions of Article 39 of the CARIFTA charter, which protected the right of less-developed countries to create and grow industries but also gave the more-developed countries the right to protect their goods from competition.25 CARICOM, CARIFTA’s reincarnated sibling, inherited both its strengths and weaknesses. caricom

CARICOM replaced CARIFTA as the mechanism that would “deepen” the integration movement. The Treaty of Chaguaramas required the institution of three CARICOM market instruments and several principal organs. The former included the Common External Tariff (CET), the Rules of Origin, and the Harmonized Scheme of Fiscal Incentives. The latter included the HGC, the Common Market Council, the Community Constitutions, and the Community Secretariat. The following examination of the assessments of CARICOM reveals the nature of these instruments, which Williams and Burnham played such important roles in creating. The assessments of CARICOM fall into two categories: those that were executed within the first seven years of its creation, and those fulfilled nearly two decades afterward. Duke Pollard examined the institutional and legal aspects of CARICOM the very day it came formally into effect: The Caribbean Community and Common Market is institutionally weak constituting merely a hesitant first step . . . [and making] no provision for a common transport policy in a region consisting of disparate entities separated from one another by thousands of miles in some cases. Similarly the schemes for the rationalization of industrial and agricultural production leave much to be desired in terms of

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implementing instrumentality. More damaging is the absence of even the most rudimentary machinery for equitable distribution of benefits deriving from economic integration.26 At the time, Pollard concluded that if the “teething” problems were solved, CARICOM’s prospects for success were fair. But after observing CARICOM at work for nearly two and a half decades, his assessment became much harsher. He pointed out the areas of weakness that had stymied achievement of its objectives: [The] Caribbean Community as an association of sovereign entities, exemplified in the legal requirement of unanimity for critical decisionmaking in both organizations and institutions, tended to be buttressed by the conspicuous absence of sanctions for non-compliance with decisions, including those relating to the primordial obligation to contribute to the regular budget of the Community.27 Agreeing with the West Indian Commission that “decision making was the ‘Achilles heel’ of the integration movement,” Pollard continued: Implementation of decisions requires informed decision-making based on appropriate consultation with various stakeholders and an in-depth study of relevant issues coupled with an unqualified commitment to the achievement of shared values and objectives. The regime emerging from Chaguaramas was not designed to accommodate these essential ingredients.28 Like Pollard, Gittens also examines the instruments of CARICOM. He is particularly critical of the functions of the secretary general and secretariat, which ensured impartiality but induced impotence.29 However, more than two decades after Gittens’s assessment, the reality is that the scale of the possible interventions by the secretariat was critically dependent on the personality and commitment of the sitting secretary general. Gittens concludes that between the Scylla of elitist, self-centered political leaders out of sync with the needs of the Caribbean people, and the Charybdis of the instrument they created along laissez-faire, neoliberal lines—which took no cognizance of the unbalanced economies of the underdeveloped Caribbean countries—the regional integration movement was incapable of promoting balanced and even development within the region.30

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Other authors assess CARICOM from different perspectives.31 They examine the less-than-honorable motivations of the organization’s leaders, CARICOM’s inherent strengths and weaknesses, and the dissatisfaction of the relatively less-developed countries.32 It is interesting to examine the evaluations made before both CARIFTA and CARICOM had the opportunity to prove themselves. Both criticisms and counterproposals are—and were— in keeping with the theories and models of economic development current to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Gittens severely criticizes CARICOM’s laissez-faire model and recommends the “basic needs” and “redistribution of growth” approaches. Millette and others—even Williams and Burnham themselves—refer to the “important substitution industrialization” model, and Arthur Lewis put forth his famous “theory of unlimited supplies of labor,” which had been deeply critiqued in George Beckford’s Persistent Poverty. Within all these works, we find constant references to the “production integration” model. Yet all these proposals and counterproposals turned out to be either inapplicable or inadequate to the needs of the structurally traumatized Caribbean economies. Furthermore, predictions of CARICOM’s early demise proved to be premature; to this day, CARICOM survives, even if it has not always prospered. The authors of the West Indian Commission’s report of 1992 admitted that the gradualist and cautious nature of the approach to regional integration resulted from the “trauma of federation’s failure.” However, they highlighted several technical successes that were cumulative but “desperately slow and halting,” such as the implementation of the CET and Rules of Origin. More significant successes have been recorded in areas of functional cooperation, including those concerning health and education.33 The ACP and the Lomé Convention were discussed in the previous section. Encouraged by Burnham, from whom he inherited the portfolio as minister of external affairs, Shridath Ramphal played a pivotal role in starting the ACP, so that its member countries speak with one voice in negotiations with the European community. CARICOM’s successes through joint action could indeed be regarded as one of Burnham’s most meaningful, albeit indirect, contributions to the regional integration movement. Guyana— and also Belize—reaped tremendous benefits through CARICOM’s staunch advocacy for their territorial integrity. Belize was helped in achieving independence, and a successful campaign by CARICOM led to both countries’ membership in the Organization of American States in 1991.34

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However, it is in evaluating the many areas where CARICOM has fallen short that the West Indian Commission report exposed the mixed legacy of Williams, Burnham, and their fraternal leaders. The first pages of the report deal with the general disenchantment of the people of the region with the integration movement: it had promised much but delivered little.35 Despite all the promises from Chaguaramas (1958) to Chaguaramas (1973), the people of the region still lived with unemployment, poverty, deteriorating health services, and inadequate educational systems. They were still hassled at each others’ airports while foreign tourists entered unmolested. They were not permitted to move from one member state to another while seeking jobs, an integral feature of all three attempts at regional integration. The critics of the integration movement continuously refer to the disconnection of the Caribbean people from the process. Ironically, so too did the leaders. But the leaders were the problem. They demanded integration in the name of the people, but it was seldom for the people. When Williams spoke to the people of Trinidad and Tobago at the University of Woodford Square, the resolutions they supported and the letters they signed were not theirs but his. The people were there as students to be educated, not people to be consulted. Indeed, in the heyday of Guyanese cooperative socialism, Burnham made little pretense about consulting the Guyanese people. In the aforementioned report, the Treaty of Chaguaramas was described as “a cautiously crafted document properly sensitive to what seemed feasible at the time.” It created a regional movement with a “deficit of ambition,” “strategic timidity,” and a “failing to follow through.”36 The report also highlighted other handicaps. The treaty established a common market, one of whose salient features was the free movement of capital; but the treaty contemplated only regulated movements of capital within the common market. Similarly, freedom of movement for people was an important element in the drive toward complete economic integration, yet it was undermined by the treaty’s Article 38.37 The leaders’ ambivalence about issues that were so clearly of vital importance to their people also raises the question of who were to be the primary beneficiaries of the hoped-for integration: the people or the politicians? The report excuses the fierce protection of individual territorial sovereignty on the basis of the “temper of the times” and sums up the many handicaps thus: Consensus yes, submission to majority no. Agreement yes, but with all the opportunity in the world for second thoughts. Cooperation and

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consideration yes, but only as far as it might suit the individual cause. Deadline yes, but no sanction for slippage. Decision-making yes, but for decision implementation only a grudging maybe.38 The report also revealed how little the leaders had progressed in their thinking since federation. In the debate about federation, Williams had complained bitterly about the weakness of the federal prime minister and had demanded a strong federal government. In the creation of CARICOM, a great deal of decision-making power was gathered to the center. Yet the treaty placed an ultimate brake on what progress could be made by delegating the implementation of decisions to member states. The result was that the “link between decision-taking and effective action could always be broken and broken with impunity.”39 In the federal debate, Williams’s protest was more about insufficient safeguards to prevent excesses of freedom of movement because he recognized its importance in the integration process. The aforementioned Article 38 paid only lip service to that principle. Burnham, in his famous “We Integrate or Perish” speech, had expressed a willingness to curtail his country’s national sovereignty for the cause of meaningful integration.40 Yet his actions in placing restrictions on the imports of member states, for example, showed how little meaning he attached to that promise. In his speech at the special conference of the HGC on July 4, 1973, urging the passage of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, Williams identified many of the dilemmas faced by developing countries: growth without development, growth accompanied by imbalances and distortions, and growth generated from outside rather than within.41 Yet he, Burnham, and the other leaders signed a document that perpetuated these very dilemmas. The unequal nature of the progress between the more-developed and less-developed Caribbean countries meant that some member countries would experience negative rather than positive effects of integration, such as polarization of benefits, trade diversions, and so on. The “Special Regime” that CARICOM put in place for its poorer countries did not adequately address these disadvantages. Constraints on freedom of movement inherent in Article 38 and the conscious choice of leaving the implementation of the decision to advance integration to individual member states made it possible for national interests to override regional ones and indicated that, despite their utterances, the leaders still were not prepared to make the necessary compromises in pursuit of their stated goals. They were

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still jealously guarding their national sovereignty and the power and prestige that went with it. Contradictions were again evident within the collective psyche of the Caribbean leaders. The solutions created by British exploiters for their own gain were again to be used in solving the problems of the exploited. Despite Williams’s claim, the Caribbean leaders had not learned that well. The neoclassical model that they had absorbed made certain basic assumptions about the economies of the participating units in a customs union. These assumptions were inapplicable to the poorer, underdeveloped economies of small Caribbean countries. Another handicapped child had been born. The hiaTus years

Initially, CARICOM’s progenitors were extremely conscious of its handicaps; ergo they clearly expressed their intention to carefully monitor its growth and development. They were prepared to do whatever was necessary to ensure a healthy offspring despite its tainted genes. But the parents ultimately reneged on their promise and abandoned the infant while it was barely a toddler. They stayed away over seven critical years and therefore did not observe and change the first manifestations of antisocial behavior. It would be naive to contend that the HGC’s failure to meet for more than seven years was alone responsible for the shortcomings of CARICOM or for the lack of satisfactory progress toward integration. However, it certainly exacerbated the impact of exogenous factors like the oil crisis and the onset of the debt crisis. It also cleared the way for endogenous problems to fester and spread unhampered. The HGC was the supreme policy-making organ of CARICOM, with the power to issue directions to the other principal organ, the Common Market Council, which held operational responsibility. Additionally, the legal requirement of unanimity for critical decision making existed—and does so today—in both organs and institutions. The unworkable nature of unanimity rule would quickly have become obvious if the heads had met more often in the 1970s. The Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed at the onset of the first oil crisis. The petrodollars that flowed into the coffers of Trinidad and Tobago had a Viagra-like effect on the flagging economy. On the other hand, this money had a deflating effect on the economies of two of CARICOM’s principal

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members, Jamaica and Guyana. The leaders of these two countries claimed that their signing of the treaty in no way impaired their national decisionmaking authority. But their decision to curtail imports, for example, undermined the very essence of economic integration, and Trinidad and Tobago was affected the most. Several members also used the absence of sanctions for noncompliance to renege on their obligations to pay dues and other such fees. Had the heads met regularly, these and other problems faced by the poorer member countries would have surfaced with respect to the gains from interregional trade; the HGC would have been forced to take corrective action twenty years earlier than they did, had they indeed been serious about meaningful integration. Most certainly, Guyana’s abuse of the CARICOM Multilateral Clearing Facility would have been contained—if not stopped altogether—and the reality of ideological pluralism would have been recognized and accommodated less acrimoniously. The potential for gridlock entrenched in the veto power of individual members and the all-important secretariat rendered CARICOM all but impotent. One of CARICOM’s strengths was its skill and effectiveness in negotiating as a single power with the developed world. The failure to meet curtailed this practice, with embarrassing consequences for the small countries of the region. The third plank of CARICOM’s responsibility, the coordination of foreign policy, was rendered inoperable by this lack of action. Therefore the question is why did the heads fail to meet? Consensus lays that blame squarely at Eric Williams’s door.42 Ken Boodhoo and Ivan C. Harnanan conclude that “as a consequence of his increasing ambivalence towards CARICOM in his later years, [Williams] was largely responsible for the fact that no Heads of State meetings of the organization were held for the five years previous to his death.”43 They and others suggest that several factors, including the rise of left-wing political objectives in Guyana and Jamaica, and Venezuela’s supported incursion into the region, caused Williams to become disillusioned. He was also fed up with the incompetence of some CARICOM leaders and was bitterly disappointed when Jamaica reneged on a smelter deal with Trinidad and Tobago, making the deal with Mexico instead.44 Additionally, although Williams had been generous with his petrodollars to members of CARICOM, Venezuela found it relatively easy to make economic and political forays into what Williams considered his turf. That he had, just for the asking, shared Trinidad’s bounty with other CARICOM member states was seen as testimony to Williams’s commitment to regional

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integration, though one could argue that it was an act of a selfish parent suffering guilt pangs owing to his own acts of neglect, overcompensating with bribes and expensive presents. Regardless, Williams was startled by the ingratitude of his fellow members and, disillusioned, retreated into peevish isolation. What about Forbes Burnham? It might be useful to look more closely at Burnham’s motives for supporting the integration process. In his speeches, he always focused on Guyana’s agricultural potential and how it would contribute to the economic development of the region.45 Likewise, he touted the economic (and other) benefits that would come directly to his Guyanese brethren via integration. And, as mentioned by Clive Thomas, as well as Burnham’s own supporters, the leader’s motives for supporting CARIFTA were extremely political. Burnham’s minister of foreign affairs, Rashleigh Jackson, stated that the Caribbean was central to Burnham’s thinking and to his foreign policy. Because foreign policy and domestic policy were two related aspects of one policy—that is, a national policy—foreign policy as constructed by Burnham was intrinsically concerned with serving the national interest.46 Regional integration as an element—albeit an important one—of Burnham’s foreign policy was more fully developed by Tyrone Ferguson, who argues that Guyana’s desire for closer Caribbean relations had both geostrategic and economic dimensions. However, Guyana “had a more narrowly national self-interest in that the English-speaking Caribbean nations were seen as an essential part of Guyana’s security diplomacy,” especially with respect to the important supportive advocacy role these nations played at the international forums whenever Guyana’s territorial integrity was threatened by Venezuela.47 Carl Greenidge, a former minister of finance, also made similar points. Greenidge posited that regional integration was a security blanket around which Guyana could wrap itself in protection from retaliation by the United States. Within the close embrace of the integration movement, Guyana would be less susceptible to attack, since such an act would be seen as one against the entire regional movement.48 Some have supposed that all of Burnham’s regional integration initiatives were mere “posturings to divert attention from growing unpopularity at home.”49 This particular criticism—and even others—should be judged against the background and consistency of Burnham’s actions and pronouncements concerning the issue. Such an examination reveals that Burnham’s actions, in light of his restricted options, were no more or less selfcentered than those of other Caribbean leaders, including Eric Williams.

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His pronouncements about the benefits of integration for the region and for Guyana in particular, as well as his assertions about the contribution Guyana could make toward its achievement, remained the same throughout his political life; he expressed the same sentiments in 1956 when he had had little political power as he had in 1982 when he spoke as executive president in Ocho Rios. These years were a time of insecurity for Burnham within and outside Guyana’s borders. As a result of his continued interest in promoting regional integration, Burnham made several attempts to have the heads convene after 1972. But it was patently clear that whatever leverage he possessed after the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas had disappeared under the disapproval of the new group of CARICOM leaders, many of whom were fiercely opposed to his ideological orientation. Burnham’s brief resurgence in leading CARICOM’s response to the 1979 Grenada Revolution soon evaporated under the intense prevailing belief that he had ordered the assassination of activist Walter Rodney. Burnham became a sort of pariah in CARICOM and no longer commanded the respect, influence, or moral authority to persuade anyone to attend future HGC conferences. The situation had not changed much by the time Williams died in 1981. Adding to Burnham’s problems was the certainty with which the Protocol of Port of Spain, brokered by Williams, would not be renewed. The instability of CARICOM meant that Burnham was losing his security blanket at a time when the threat it had helped guard against was once again raising its head. One can appreciate the desperation with which Burnham attempted to have Guyana host a meeting of the heads in early 1982, the year the Protocol of Port of Spain was due to end. But in arranging for some of the conference deliberations to be held in this disputed territory, Burnham underestimated the extent to which he had lost face. The rejection of his offer was almost a foregone conclusion. At the HGC summit that same year in Ocho Rios, the third in the eightyear existence of CARICOM, Burnham was taken to task over the political and human rights situations in Guyana. The squabbling had begun. His influence in CARICOM had reached its nadir. The situation remained virtually unchanged until his death in August 1985. These hiatus years help to underscore the continued influence of Eric Williams in the regional integration movement, but they also put Burnham’s role, vis-à-vis that of Williams, into proper perspective. Both men held great sway in the early days of the debate, yet their own unawareness and self-motivation became their undoing, albeit in different ways, and allowed for the

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grapes of regional integration to sour on the vine. As such, these years dim the halos surrounding the heads of these two influential men. concLusion

Eric Williams and Forbes Burnham have both received well-deserved praise for their roles in the integration movement, but their legacies have become mixed. The two men had contrasting personalities but held a similar vision with respect to integration. They felt integration would put an end to the fragmentation, insularity, individualism, and parochialism carried over from the colonial past. More important, they believed integration would help break the shackles of colonialism that entrapped the psyche of the Caribbean people. As Caribbean men, however, they were products of this same environment, but with outlooks also influenced by the elitist educations they acquired in Great Britain. This contradiction—the subjugated and the subjugator—led to a contradiction in their own values and played itself out through the instruments they selected to achieve integration: federation, CARIFTA, and CARICOM. The result was the creation of three handicapped children. The first is federation, intrinsically weak and incapable of dealing with all the inherent problems of integration. Williams supported federation because, at the time, it was the only means by which Caribbean nation-states could acquire independence. Yet Williams stood at the forefront of the squabble that brought federation to an end, although he still recognized the need to keep the process going and thus founded the HGC. The motives shifted here, however, and the tactic was to bring about federation through gradual stages of economic integration with both British and non-British members. Burnham supported Williams in this endeavor. The second child of Williams and Burnham was CARIFTA, an HGC instrument meant to achieve economic regional integration. In crafting this instrument, both men presented to their publics a vision of a common market through which goods and citizens could flow freely, and spoke eloquently about how CARIFTA would unite the member states under a stronger, single voice, one that could be used in negotiating with the world. But as leaders of two of the more-developed member states, Williams and Burnham did not act to this true purpose and thus gave birth to another handicapped offspring. They ignored viable models that would share newfound wealth among all member states, and instead chose instruments that would protect

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their individual interests as heads of state and on behalf of their own nations. While they believed in the unity of a single world voice, they did so because it would extend their own countries’ credibility while ensuring their personal power at home. In essence, Williams and Burnham fashioned CARIFTA as a political tool, not as a pristinely economic one, and, in so doing, perpetuated a colonial model simply with different players. CARICOM became the third child of this handicapped triumvirate. As an outgrowth of CARIFTA, CARICOM has historically shown notable successes, especially in functional cooperation and joint action. Yet “the people” do not feel this tool of integration has benefited them much. Due in part to the Treaty of Chaguaramas signed by Williams and Burnham, CARICOM’s power lay in the hands of the HGC, an entity that failed to meet during seven of CARICOM’s developmental years. The reason for this failure lay at the feet of Williams and Burnham: one man felt unappreciated by his populace and slunk away to seclusion; the other forever lost his sway by clinging so fiercely to his own political ideals. In being left unattended and uncared for, CARICOM’s handicap became one of neglect and misuse and thus failed to achieve the men’s jointly held hope of regional integration. Today, the recent creation of the Association of Caribbean States has brought to fruition one of Williams’s and Burnham’s visions: unification. But how far the region still has to go, forty years after the demise of the West Indies Federation, is illustrated by Barbados prime minister Owen Arthur’s sentiments: We need regional institutions; the rhetoric from politicians and intellectuals in favor of such institutions is strong, but we are not willing to practice to support them or make adequate or competent arrangements to make them viable. It is a kind of childishness or naïveté only explicable in terms of the inborn insularity of most regional leaders. Despite what they may say, their imagination is usually limited by their borders and they only react ritualistically in a crisis.50 noTes 1. G. K. Lewis, Growth of the Modern West Indies, 365. 2. Ibid. 3. Christine Miller, in her unpublished MA thesis, “Political Aspects of Economic Integration in the Commonwealth Caribbean” (46–47), cites Bela Balassa and distinguishes five

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levels of integration. The first is a free trade area that involves the freeing of trade among members of the economic grouping. There is no requirement for a common external tariff, nor is total freeing of trade necessary. The second level is the customs union, involving the elimination of internal restrictions. Member of a customs union maintain a common trade policy toward nonmember countries, thus actually limiting the power of member countries to set external tariffs. The major benefit of a customs union is that it ensures a market for regionally produced goods. The third level is the common market, similar to the customs union but distinguished by the free movement of the factors of production within the region. Though the terms customs union and common market could be used interchangeably, the latter is only applicable when labor is allowed to move freely among member states. The fourth level is an economic union: this embodies all the lower integration levels and goes on to incorporate harmonized monetary, fiscal, and social policies. The highest level is total economic integration, which encompasses the range of policies involved in economic union, but where policy making is delegated to supranational bodies whose decisions are binding on member states. 4. Williams, “A New Federation for the Commonwealth Caribbean,” 248. 5. Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 284–96. 6. Boodhoo, Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader, 101. 7. Gittens, “The Caribbean Community and Common Market,” 89–90. 8. Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 299. 9. Ibid., 381. 10. Ibid., 383. 11. Minutes of the Legislative Council of British Guiana. 12. Hall, Integrate or Perish, 323. 13. Pollard, “Institutional and Legal Aspects of the Caribbean Community,” 40–41; and the fact sheet “The History of CARICOM” produced by the CARICOM Secretariat. 14. Miller, “Political Aspects of Economic Integration,” 5. 15. Pollard, “Institutional and Legal Aspects of the Caribbean Community,” 42. 16. Huntley, “The LDCs and CARICOM,” 36. 17. Gittens, “The Caribbean Community and Common Market,” 90. 18. Millette, “The Caribbean Free Trade Association,” 32–48. 19. Ibid., 44. 20. Miller, “Political Aspects of Economic Integration,” 102. 21. Ramphal, “Remembering to Score,” 157. 22. Miller, “Political Aspects of Economic Integration,” 102. 23. Thomas, “The Community Is a Big Paper Tiger,” 27. 24. V. Lewis, “Major Tasks for the 1980s,” 43. 25. Millette, “The Caribbean Free Trade Association,” 35. 26. Pollard, “Institutional and Legal Aspects,” 73. 27. Pollard, “The Community,” 26. 28. Ibid. 29. Gittens, “The Caribbean Community and Common Market,” 136. 30. Ibid., 178–88.

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31. Farrell, “Five Major Problems of CARICOM”; Girvan, “Three Areas of Regional Crisis”; Ramsaran, “CARICOM’s Soft Belly”; Huntley, “The LDCs and CARICOM,” 16–38; Thomas, “The Community Is a Big Paper Tiger,” 27. 32. Ibid. 33. Time for Action, 36–39. 34. Ibid., 37. 35. Ibid., 22–29. 36. Ibid., 42–44. 37. According to Article 38, “Nothing in the treaty shall be construed as requiring or imposing any obligation on a Member State to grant freedom of movement to persons into their territory whether or not such persons are nationals of other member states.” 38. Time for Action, 47. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. Burnham, A Destiny to Mould, 248. 41. Hall, Integrate or Perish, 459–60. I agree with Williams, but others do not. 42. In an interview, Byron Blake, an assistant secretary general of CARICOM, stated that in his later years, because of his failing health, Williams was probably not informed of the attempts to get the heads to meet. The former minister of foreign affairs Rashleigh Jackson felt that the blame was not specifically Eric Williams’s, but rather that the other leaders felt that even if they did meet, little would be achieved owing to tensions in the movement. 43. Boodhoo, Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader, 102. 44. Ibid., 107–9; Hall, The Caribbean Community, 17. 45. E.g., Burnham’s contributions in the Legislative Council’s debate about his resolution that British Guiana should join the West Indies Federation; his “We Integrate or Perish” speech of 1967 to the Conference of Officials of the Commonwealth Caribbean Territories in Georgetown; his address to the Fourteenth Annual Delegates Conference of the PNC in April 1971; and his address to the Third Biennial Congress of the PNC in August 1979. 46. Jackson, “Forbes Burnham and Foreign Policy.” 47. Ferguson, To Survive Sensibly or to Court Heroic Death, 121–24. 48. Greenidge, Empowering a Peasantry in a Caribbean Context, 115; Carl Greenidge, interview by author, October 2001. 49. L. Lewis, “Forbes Burnham (1923–1945),” 103–4. 50. Editorial, Stabroek News, January 15, 2002.

chapter 4

eric WiLLiams Protagonist or antagonist of caribbean integration? sharon aLexander-gooding

As a child, I heard time and time again that Eric Williams had “mashed up the West Indies Federation,” his well-known mantra “one from ten leaves naught” often accompanying the statement.1 I was always intrigued by the antecedent events that led to this proclamation about the West Indies Federation, the aftermath that the comments encouraged, and by Williams as a Caribbean icon. So, growing up, I developed a profound interest in federalist efforts and the position of the Caribbean in the era of globalization. In this piece, I endeavor to highlight Williams’s federalist record, the significant factors of the federation attempt, and what I sometimes refer to as “the view from without,” those nonindigenous perspectives that crystallize some of the topical positions of prominent figures like C. L. R. James and Sir Arthur Lewis. Williams’s piece “My Federation Record” documents his numerous instances of public advocacy by voice and by pen in both the United States and the Caribbean. That there must be a political Caribbean federation, to be followed by an economic one of the entire Caribbean area, was Williams’s belief. In a public lecture he delivered at Howard University in 1940, “The Negro in the British West Indies,” the penultimate sentence declares: Positive steps will also be taken toward the establishment of WI federation with some form of dominion status, a move which will abolish the present anomaly of various tiny isolated communities each administered at colossal expenses with its own government, its own customs service, its own medical service and police forces.2 This thrust as advocated by Williams called for a highly centralized federation characterized by powerful control and authority for economic intervention. However, this conception of regional political unity conflicted with 97

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4.1 The West Indies Federation, 1958–62. “One from ten leaves naught,” said Eric Williams of the withdrawal of Jamaica from the ten-member organization and its subsequent collapse. Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

other visions of “a looser federal structure,” which many felt allowed for greater political autonomy in the individual units.3 A year later, in an article titled “The Impact of the International Crisis upon the Negro in the Caribbean,” Williams called the Caribbean islands an “absurdity” of tiny, isolated governments duplicating one another at tremendous cost, and stated that “some form of federation is demanded at least by common sense.”4 He continued by speaking about insignificant, dependent units in a world that was becoming more and more economically interdependent, as well as the need for cooperation on a common platform. In his 1942 book The Negro in the Caribbean, Williams reiterated his stance on the disparity of these Caribbean units and stated that “the federation of the administrative, reducing the number of governors and bureaucrats, followed by the establishment of federal legislature, is essential to future progress . . . and is the path to statesmanship in the future.”5 Later that same year, his article “Crossways of the Caribbean” noted: The world drive to larger units is reflected in the Caribbean and constructive statesmanship should look beyond a federation along national political lines to an economic federation of these areas so similar in climate, history, racial composition, and economy.6

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Williams’s rhetoric treated the Caribbean as a microcosm of the wider world, where regionalism as an economic force was beginning to play a major role. At a joint Latin American conference in 1943, Williams further emphasized that “all plans must take into consideration the fact that the Caribbean is an interrelated unit, for such a federation there must be the full participation of the integrated units of the Caribbean. . . . A Caribbean federation would solve industrial problems that small countries are unable to handle.”7 Then, speaking about the “four freedoms of Jamaica,” he said, “Jamaica by itself, Trinidad by itself, Barbados by itself, and I may say Cuba and Puerto Rico by themselves, will always be entirely at the economic mercy of the more advanced and more powerful countries in the world.”8 Williams went on to propose a reorganization of the sugar industry, self-sustaining agriculture, and promotion of Caribbean industries all within economic, political, and social unity.9 At Howard University in September of that same year, he was visionary in his rationale for promulgating change, a closer union, industrialization, greater self-sufficiency, and a planned economy: The Caribbean, if it is to survive and prosper, must be fitted as a whole into the world. . . . Federation will make possible an economic development now impossible and give the Caribbean area a bargaining power in the world which its isolated units do not now have.10 Thus Williams’s 1940s vision of the Caribbean as an economic bloc with bargaining power predates globalization, an idea that now forces the Caribbean to attempt to level the playing field through the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Other evidence attests to Williams’s desire to link the defense of West Indian interests in external markets, and through prolific articles and lectures from 1944 to 1946, he aggressively promoted his idea of a British West Indian University, one that would emphasize regional educational needs (including those of the entire Caribbean area, not just the British Caribbean) and encourage “a broader pan-Caribbean outlook” for the body politic. Despite these efforts, Williams did meet with opposition to federalist ideas from the colonial office. As stated in the Colonial Review in 1945: It is interesting to note, in view of Colonel Stanley’s recent dispatch to the Governors of the West Indian Colonies, that Eric Williams’s study led him to believe that the “future progress of the Caribbean lay in political and economic federation.”11

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In “My Federation Record,” Williams provides details about the Dominica Conference vote for a federation capital and declares that he cared not where the capital was, “as long as it was in the British West Indies.”12 He even referred to the selection of smaller and less important centers as potential sites, thus avoiding jealousies of larger cities, and cited the examples of Washington rather than New York as the US federal capital, and Canada’s Ottawa rather than Toronto or Montreal. Williams also objected to the colonialist measures in the West Indies Federation’s 1958 constitution. These included monetary grants from Britain, financial controls by her, and the measures she had taken to discourage Caribbean migration from island to island. The idea of freedom of movement was a growing problem, one that essentially became large-scale immigration to Trinidad from the smaller islands. Moreover, Britain had approved British Guiana’s secession. Added to all of this was that the British weighed in on the capital debate, choosing Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad in that order, although a majority vote at the 1957 prefederation conference in Jamaica had selected Trinidad. Williams’s early record therefore showed a keen and passionate interest in Caribbean integration although the historical Caribbean tradition was one of fragmentation. He described “satisfying the aspirations of our peoples and correcting the deficiencies left behind by the colonial regimes” as an uphill internal battle, and the need to “[protect] our developing economies from the more powerful economies of developed countries and achieving terms and relations of trade which will not jeopardize our political independence or perpetuate our economic dependence” as an external challenge.13 Among the significant factors impeding federation were the absence of a comprehensive conception of federation, a lack of economic perspective, interterritorial jealousies, and the pedestrian, self-centered approach of the British. Added to these factors were a weak administrative machinery proposed by Britain, opposition by vested interests, popular ignorance about the subject that allowed for misinformation and rumor, and constraints caused by transportation, distance, and communication. Some of Williams’s suggestions for combating the negativities included educational awareness programs at the primary school level and the establishment of a propaganda agency to sell federalist ideas. He also began a series of lectures in 1955, documented and recorded as “The British WI Federation: Lands, Peoples, Problems,” where he traveled to Trinidad’s neighboring member states in support of these programs.

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According to Lloyd Erskine Sandiford, although long in creation, the federation attempt was rather short (from 1958 to 1962), and many reasons have been advanced for its quick collapse. These include problems associated with the lack of common identity, the lack of an external enemy that would have forced the units to bind together for survival, the limitations of interterritorial trade, a weak constitution, few financial resources, Jamaica and Trinidad being underrepresented in the federal parliament, and the lack of a functional cooperative approach to trade, currency, and monetary policies. And, of course, Mr. Williams’s arithmetic of “10 – 1 = 0” presented an “all or nothing” sentiment. However, in a letter to Professor Bernard Crick at Birbeck College, Williams attached an article titled “A New Federation for the Commonwealth Caribbean,” in which he observed that the one common thread that had existed since 1958 was that Caribbean territories had been “nurtured in a climate of isolation, one from the other, and the jealousies resulted therefrom.”14 Britain had done little, if nothing, to encourage interisland cooperation, and she now seemed to be disagreeing internally about the scope of the West Indies Federation. Although the Royal Commission of 1876 had stressed the importance of consultative action “without infringing on the constitutional independence of any one colony,” the 1930s saw Great Britain create pro-federation entities including the Closer Union Commission, the Dominica Conference of 1932, and the Caribbean Labour Congress of 1938, as well as adapting the previous focus of the Royal Commission.15 Williams’s unpublished notes, which are now stored in the Eric Williams Memorial Collection at the University of West Indies’ Saint Augustine campus, point to problems arising from the scope of the West Indies Federation and the British perspective of the necessity—or desirability—of federation with the attendant unsettling administrative questions, inherent difficulties of transportation, opposition by vested interests (e.g., Barbadian planters, Trinidad’s Chamber of Commerce), and popular ignorance of the topic. With these multiple uncertainties, the federal government came into existence with pomp and circumstance but no real power, as well as with the oversight of a governor-general from Britain’s ruling party. Not surprisingly, the federal government thus became a battleground for two major issues: independence and revision of the constitution. So, too, when the British government sought to pull the floundering airline British West Indian Airways (BWIA), a subsidiary of British Overseas Airways Corporation, from the West Indian route, immediate discussions

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began about establishing a Caribbean national airline with the West Indies Federation government as major shareholder and the unit territories as minor ones. These negotiations soon fell apart, and Premier Williams moved to purchase the airline on behalf of Trinidad to preserve the common approach to aviation.16 Within its thrust for independence, Trinidad emphasized the “re-negotiation of the 1941 Agreement with the United States and the restoration of Chaguaramas to the national patrimony.”17 This became the point of departure between Williams and fellow Trinidadian historian and sociologist C. L. R. James, who felt the timing was wrong for such insistence. But, according to Williams, renegotiation was needed in response to Jamaica’s desire for its own autonomy, that is, its stance for “non-interference with its right to its own conception and practice of economic development [while] Trinidad insisted on a strong centralized federation with extensive powers, especially in the field of economic integration and regional planning.”18 Jamaica also wanted representation in the federal parliament based on population; Williams resisted this concept, as it would surely give Jamaica more voting power. Evidence from the “Revision of Federal Constitution” shows that Williams defined “effective population” as “what we pay to federal government based on resources.”19 He continued to seek “inspiration” within other federal constitutions across the globe and published the treatise “The Economics of Nationhood” as the forum for support in the smaller territories.20 The result of this battle is well-known, with Jamaica calling for a referendum, and the British government agreeing to Jamaica’s secession and independence. Trinidad and Tobago followed suit, dismantling a federation that had lasted a mere four years. Nevertheless, three common services were salvaged after the breakup: the establishment of UWI, the shipping services that managed the operations of the gift ships (i.e., the Federal Palm and the Federal Maple), and Caribbean meteorological services. Independence then became the focal interest of many territories; Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago were soon followed by Guyana and Barbados (after the “Little Eight” failure).21 It is interesting to note that Williams led the first initiative to organize a Heads of Governments of Commonwealth Caribbean Countries in a continuing effort at integrative cooperation. A second initiative was taken by Antigua, Barbados, and Guyana to form the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), to which Williams lent his support, with most of the territories subscribing later. The provision of technical assistance, principally by Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, to the smaller countries was a

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third initiative promulgated to sustain integration after these larger countries gained independence. By 1973 the Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed. This was an outstanding development in economic integration because the treaty contained a common external tariff, the harmonization of fiscal incentives, and an investment corporation for stimulating industrial development in the smaller countries. However, the treaty was not without its problems. The distinguished West Indian luminary Sir Arthur Lewis listed several avoidable errors, any one of which may have cost the life of the West Indies Federation: the delay by the colonial office in holding conferences; the break between the desire for federation and for self-government; the seating of the federal capital in Port of Spain (Trinidad) instead of Jamaica, where sentiment would have been strengthened as a result; and review of the constitution before allowing the federal government to gather strength.22 Williams then incurred some personality and leadership conflicts that helped ignite the fires of discontent with Jamaican premier Norman Manley, who had declined the 1958 invitation to become prime minister of the West Indies Federation, and the Barbadian statesman Grantley Adams, who had accepted it. Political temperatures were then raised by many factors, including Manley’s sudden proposal to violate the principles of internal free trade, Adams’s lack of parliamentary tact, both men’s refusal to resume negotiations on the federal structure (though they had vowed to do so before 1962), and the publication of Williams’s Economics of Nationhood. Furthermore, had secretary of state Iain MacLeod stepped in to counsel Jamaica, Manley’s referendum for secession might well have been withdrawn. That this did not occur, and that Adams did not reveal Manley’s intention, led to acrimony between the three men and, ultimately, the failure of federation. Lewis’s summary view was that the West Indian leaders did not understand the nature of federation, inherent in which leaders should concentrate on what they agree on and set aside the matters on which they disagree; Adams, Williams, and Manley were leaders who lacked compromise. What had been needed was the practice of “quiet diplomacy” to iron out differences.23 James expressed his frustration about the situation in three letters he wrote between late 1960 and early 1961. He felt the West Indies Federation referendum had not only resulted in Jamaica’s falling out of the union but also poisoned the “whole political atmosphere in the West Indies.”24 James brought the matter down to personalities, citing the words that Manley (“Those gentlemen of the smaller islands will not be able to rob us because I have safeguarded Jamaica from them!”) and Alexander Bustamante (“Those

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rascals from the smaller islands will rob us all of what we have!”) spoke to their Jamaican people.25 James also labeled Williams’s handling of the Chaguaramas situation “a national disaster” and mentioned that the discord between Williams and Manley had resulted in chaos. James then drafted his solution to the problems at hand through a political program based on what he termed “a genuine federation and not what we got.”26 He advocated first restoring the public’s confidence, interest, expectation, and enthusiasm and encouraged Adams, in his new role of federation premier, to prepare a “clear and calm” federalist economic program that could lead to financial aid and support for the smaller islands, whose leaders were looking on in dismay at the looming calamity. One cannot ignore some of the early rumblings in the federation camp for which Williams has been blamed. Federal Archives papers from February 1960 refer to Williams’s public castigation of the West Indies Federation’s government, calling its leaders “stooges of the colonial office,” reprimanding its “inadequate consultation of the unit territories,” and averring that “Trinidad and Tobago had suffered more from this lack of consultation than any other territory.”27 Although Williams may have been justified in his thinking, this public approach resulted in a “stinging reply” from Adams in a radio broadcast and press release in which he called Williams’s statements “inaccurate, misleading, and untruthful.” Williams countered with grievances about the federal government’s inaction on the BWIA issue and the conference’s slow action to discuss the revised US bases agreement;28 this extremely public spat by Adams and Williams was tantamount to the West Indian saying “washing dirty linen in public.” These and other controversial matters were finally settled in January 1961 at a meeting convened between the West Indies Federation government and the Trinidadian government at the suggestion of Williams. The meeting formalized an agreement on the following points: (a) the establishment of a Liaison Committee between the federal and Trinidad and Tobago governments to consider: (i) the Marine complex at Teteron Bay; (ii) the utilization of the vocational training facilities which are to be provided; (iii) radio and television time and programmes; (b) the establishment or re-constitution of a Liaison Committee for Venezuela Affairs; and,

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(c) the ceremonies in connection with the signing of the Bases Agreement.29 Although Williams evoked some hostility, his record in the West Indies Federation debacle clearly showed his strong commitment to the union and to Trinidad and Tobago through actions big and small. For example, he personally sought housing in Trinidad for the West Indies Federation ministers and officials for this meeting. The 1957 Standing Federation Committee recorded its “grateful appreciation” for Williams’s role in creating Federation Park. Williams himself recorded the stress and strain of a “working lunch at the Normandie” in 1960 where two leaders were “not on speaking terms,” so, in an effort to iron out a cabinet proposal, Williams had to pass information from one man to the other, a serious dilemma because he had only one hearing aid.30 His handwritten notes also confirm that some West Indian leaders confided in him their fears of potential troubles and difficulties with Jamaican nationalism, as well as his deep conviction that the masses felt strongly that British Guiana and British Honduras should have stayed on board with federation. Williams’s commitment is also immortalized by the evidence of his moves to emphasize Caribbean studies as an integral part of the UWI curriculum and its extension to secondary schools. His promotion of the study of languages—English, French, and Spanish—evidenced his commitment to Caribbean fraternization, as did his call for the development of a Caribbean personality through pan-Caribbeanism, sponsorship of Caribbean youth rallies, and the establishment of a gallery of Caribbean emancipators. Despite the shenanigans between national interests and regional ambitions, the West Indies Federation had some substance in that it formalized structural solutions to issues that still confront the region today and, in so doing, reflected the legitimate hopes of the Caribbean people. These structures enabled individual nation-states to shape their own destinies, operate on the basis of their own constitutions, negotiate internationally as one entity, and free themselves from metropolitan rule. Politics in the federal era centered on conflicting aspirations of central autonomy and control versus insular national political autonomy, and even as the political structures of federalism came to an abrupt end in 1962, the ideas and efforts relating to integration continued. The setback did not destroy Williams’s federal spirit, for he later joined the Caribbean Free Trade Association and CARICOM, but it certainly served as a blow to him both politically and personally.

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Williams advocated federation, and his views were made apparent in “My Federation Record,” where he sought to trace the historical route to unity (and disunity) from the 1940s to the 1960s. Here he complains bitterly about “red herrings drawn across the federation trail” and the procrastination of others.31 But the same document contains his own lecture from the All-Jamaica Conference in the United States: We who have the interests of the West Indies at heart must therefore realize that in the world of the future the West Indian islands, if they are to play any part, must cease to think of themselves as island units and must begin to think and plan in terms of a federated West Indian group. Jamaica by itself, Trinidad by itself, Barbados by itself and may I say, Cuba and Puerto Rico by themselves, will always be entirely at the economic mercy of the more advanced and more powerful countries of the world. If the sugar industry is to be reorganized, as every investigator realizes it must be; if the West Indian people are to develop some of their own foodstuffs on their own shores; if industries suitable to the islands are to be fostered; if West Indian education is to receive the attention which so important a subject deserves; then it must be done by the West Indian peoples as a whole, aiming always at an economic, social and political unity, first among themselves, and on that basis with the rest of the world.32 The breakup of the West Indies Federation left for the West Indian people the lesson that any union of political superstructures must reflect and be based on an infrastructure that enables equitable economic relations. As Loukas Tsoukalis stated in 1977, “A relatively equitable distribution of the gains and losses, or at least perception of such an equitable distribution, can be a determining factor for the continuation of the integration process.”33 Eric Eustace Williams had been promulgating this theory a quarter century earlier and indeed left a legacy not as an antagonist of Caribbean integration but as its champion. noTes 1. Williams uttered his famous line “one from ten leaves naught” in a speech at the University of Woodford Square in 1961. The phrase signaled that Jamaica was about to secede from the West Indies Federation, having gained British permission to become independent and

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leaving Trinidad and Tobago to lead the other eight member states in forming a smaller coalition. As a result, the power of federation took a mighty blow, and Trinidad soon followed suit, seeking its own autonomy. The remaining eight member states, dubbed the “Little Eight,” were left to attempt their own federation (see note 21 hereafter). 2. Williams, “The Negro in the British West Indies.” 3. Benn, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, 86. 4. Williams, “The Impact of the International Crisis upon the Negro in the Caribbean,” 524–35. 5. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (Greenwood Press ed.), 103–4. 6. Williams, “Crossways of the Caribbean,” 122. 7. Williams, “Economic Problems of the Caribbean Area,” 57–58. 8. Williams, “The Four Freedoms for Jamaica,” 20–21. 9. Ibid. 10. Williams, “The Implications of Federation.” 11. Colonial Review, September 1945. 12. Williams, “My Federation Record.” 13. Ibid. 14. Williams, “Letter to Professor Bernard Crick.” 15. Williams, “A New Federation for the Commonwealth Caribbean” (typewritten, annotated transcript). 16. “Future of B.W.I.A.” 17. “Relations with Unit Governments—Trinidad,” File FWI-GG-GA-200. 18. Ibid. 19. Williams, “Revision of the Federal Constitution,” Legislative Council Debates, September 11, 1959. 20. Williams, “Proposed Federal Constitution for the British Caribbean” (handwritten notes). 21. Because of the failure of federation, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago easily assumed independence and left regional federation twisting in the wind. An attempt was made to conjoin the remaining “Little Eight” islands of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Saint Kitts–Nevis, Anguilla, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines into a “Federation of the Eastern Caribbean,” with Barbados playing the leading organizational and financial role. This responsibility frightened off Barbados, and it then focused on independence, which it gained in 1966. See http://www.mongabay.com/history/ caribbean_islands/caribbean_islands-postwar_federation_efforts.html. 22. Sir (William) Arthur Lewis was a Saint Lucian–born economist who met Williams while awaiting entrance to college; they were lifelong friends. Dr. Lewis was a preeminent authority on economic development, especially that of newly independent countries such as Ghana, for which he served as economic adviser after its independence in 1957. He published the seminal work The Theory of Economic Growth in 1955, a treatise that built on his “Dual Sector” theory (“the Lewis Model”), and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979. Lewis was keenly interested in the emerging independence of the Caribbean nation-states, and his demonstrated economic expertise was often solicited by Williams.

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23. For comprehensive profiles of these men and other charismatic personalities of the preand postindependence Caribbean, see Sealy, Sealy’s Caribbean Leaders. 24. James, “Letters to George.” 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. “Relations with Unit Governments—Trinidad,” File FWI-GG-GA-200. 28. Details of this exchange were extracted from several 1960 newspaper clippings and correspondence contained in the Eric Williams Memorial Collection at UWI. 29. “Relations with Unit Governments—Trinidad,” File FWI-GG-GA-201. 30. This story was taken from Eric Williams’s personal diary, which is now housed in the Eric Williams Memorial Collection. 31. Williams, “My Federation Record,” 1. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Tsoukalis, The New European Economy Re-visited.

chapter 5

eric WiLLiams and coLor sTraTificaTion in The cariBBean .

WiLLiam dariTy Jr.

eThnic and coLor divides in The cariBBean

As one of his relatively less-discussed books, Eric Williams’s The Negro in the Caribbean (1942) was the product of his visit to the West Indies in 1940 on a Rosenwald Fellowship, which gave him release time from his faculty position at Howard University to conduct research for the book. While his comments about color stratification in Trinidad and Barbados in the volume came largely from firsthand knowledge, his observations about Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico were based on his Rosenwald research. The Negro in the Caribbean constituted his most detailed exploration of the origins of ethno-phenotype stratification in the West Indies. Historically, Caribbean countries have been characterized by a plurality of ethnic groups and the relative economic dominance of phenotypically white minorities. For example, in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, the central ethnic partition is between persons of African ancestry, who constitute 40 percent of the population, and persons of East Indian ancestry, who also constitute 40 percent of the population. The remaining 20 percent—“other ethnicities”—include whites of primarily British origin, Chinese, Syrians, Lebanese, and persons of mixed parentage.1 Addington Coppin and Reed Neil Olsen’s research using Trinidad’s Continuous Sample Survey of the Population of 1993 reveals the magnitude of intergroup disparity. Working men of African and Indian ancestry averaged 75 cents and 64 cents respectively per dollar earned by men of other ethnicities; African and Indian working women averaged 77 cents and 70 cents respectively for each dollar earned by other women. The gaps between employed Africans and Indians in earnings are by no means trivial, but they are clearly not as large as those between each of these groups and others. 109

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Furthermore, a series of earnings-differential decompositions by Coppin and Olsen demonstrate the presence of significant labor market discrimination against both Africans and Indians in a country where the two groups, in combination, form the numerical majority of the population. Coppin and Olsen conclude that the losses in earnings due to discrimination were greater for women and men of African ancestry than those incurred by Indian men and women; however, both groups had been penalized by unequal treatment in Trinbagonian labor markets. Concomitantly, Trinidadians of other ethnicities benefited from ethnic “nepotism” on their behalf in these labor markets.2 The study’s authors make clear the historical basis for the privileged position of persons of other ethnicities, especially males: [The outcomes depicted here are] very likely the legacy of [other ethnicities’] differential access to educational and labour market opportunities, relative to Africans and Indians. It is well-known that individuals in the Other Ethnicities group—particularly men—have historically had greater access to the limited number of places in the post-primary education system; but, even where they could not take advantage of this preferential access, good quality jobs were still well within their domain.3 The anthropologist Carol S. Holzberg conducted two studies, in 1977 and 1987, of the tiny Jewish population in Jamaica in the 1970s, which again shows a pattern of relative economic dominance by a small ethnic minority. Circa 1975, Jewish people in Jamaica made up less than 1 percent of the population (about 450 persons in total), but Holzberg finds that they constituted 24 percent of the island’s entrepreneurial elite. In contrast, black Jamaicans constituted only 6 percent of the island’s entrepreneurial elite. Holzberg also finds that, in 1974, three out of the four of the largest nonfinancial corporations listed on the Jamaican stock exchange were publicly traded offshoots of formerly private Jewish-owned businesses;4 the fourth nonfinancial corporation was interlocked with the other three via marriage. A similar pattern is detected by Abraham van der Mark in Curaçao during the same interval: “Although the number of Sephardic Jews in Curaçao is declining, they still occupy high status positions completely out of proportion to their numbers.”5 What accounted for this? Holzberg dismisses what she viewed as simplistic answers such as a Jewish cultural predisposition to work harder than

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others, a genetic edge in entrepreneurial DNA, or the premise “that Jews belong to an international brotherhood of mutual self-help (with headquarters in New York or Jerusalem).”6 Instead she emphasizes “phenotypic and historic dimensions” as critical to understanding the emergence of Jamaica’s entrepreneurial elite; here phenotyping involved the capacity of Jews to merge racially with Caribbean whites, and history involved the long presence of Sephardim in the Caribbean and Latin America. Specifically, Jews had an extensive engagement as owners—rather than laborers—in the sectors generating wealth in the region.7 Ironically, van der Mark makes the exact argument Holzberg rejects, stressing the existence of a vast international Jewish commercial network, as well as “descent and the particular economic ethos associated with Judaism.”8 The Jewish presence in the Americas and the Caribbean began with the Inquisition and Jews’ expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sephardic Jews, that is, Jews of Portuguese and Spanish ancestry, migrated to the New World in search of a fresh start.9 The historian Paul Johnson reports that “by the mid-seventeenth century, it was essentially Sephardim in the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco [now modern-day Brazil] who owned and operated the largest number of Brazil’s sugar refineries.”10 They were successful in refining slave-grown sugar despite being subjected to surveillance as “New Christians,” which led them to become an insular and cohesive community. When expelled from Brazil in 1654, Sephardic Jews “helped to create the sugar industry in Barbados and Jamaica.”11 As early as 1510, Diego Columbus—Christopher’s brother—inaugurated the colony of New Seville, “peopled . . . with Marranos—the secret Jews who had accompanied Columbus on all his voyages—with the hope of escaping the Spanish Inquisition.” New Seville eventually became Jamaica, and Jews “became the island’s longest resident-settlers of any color, race, or religion.”12 The indigenous people were exterminated by the Spanish genocidal wars, the Spanish were expelled by the English when they took over Jamaica, and enslaved Africans were imported after plantation agriculture had been initiated by New Seville’s first colonists. Thus Jews have had a long-standing role at the lead of Jamaica’s economy as owners of sugar plantations and merchants. On Curaçao, slavery was not practiced on the same scale as it was in Jamaica—the Curaçaon economy was less reliant on plantation agriculture—but Jewish settlers on Curaçao were heavily involved in trade and shipping, which may explain van der Mark’s tendency to emphasize international Jewish trading networks.

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An ethno-phenotypical divide is also evident in the Spanish Caribbean, particularly in the case of Nicaragua. The Spanish-speaking mestizo majority exhibits deep prejudice against Miskito Indians and African-Caribbean blacks. The anthropologist Roger Lancaster makes particular note of segregated basketball games and discusses race-based personal avoidance: Whenever Atlantic coast blacks enter a Managua bus, people tend to move away from them—in a country where there is generally little aversion to close physical contact, and where public transportation is overloaded.13 Lancaster proposes that “colorism” is the more accurate description of mestizo attitudes in Nicaragua.14 The preference for whiteness pervades Nicaragua; among mestizos, “black is primitive, irrational, dirty, and less attractive than white, and blackness is clearly associated with evil.”15 In the Dominican Republic, the preference for whiteness has, on occasion, taken on horrific dimensions. The Trujillo regime attempted to make the Dominican Republic a “white country” and massacred thousands of darker-skinned Haitians in the western part of the country in 1937.16 The general role of color and ascription in the Caribbean was also explored by David Lowenthal more than four decades ago. Lowenthal explicitly connected class status and color stratification as a norm in the West Indies: “In the middle class color is the racial determinant of status and status is the major goal in life.” He refers to the use of hair straightening, bleaching creams, lotions, and peroxide as means of gravitating toward the phenotypical norms of whiteness.17 The desire for lighter skin, with the attendant health hazards of bleaching and chemical straightening, persists for women—and increasingly for men—today. In January 2007, Jamaica’s Health Ministry announced its “Don’t Kill the Skin” campaign to dissuade its citizens from using skin-lightening creams, replete with their destructive chemicals. In addition to the creams, “some Jamaicans use toothpaste, curry powder, milk powder, household bleach, and cornmeal to lighten their skin.”18 During his forty-year-long study, Lowenthal also found Caribbean racial minorities exercising economic power throughout the region: The West Indian white, identified by color with imperialism and oppression, can seldom hope to win an election. No head of government can risk alienating popular support by making many white appointments.

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Because West Indianization is official policy in all but the French islands, there will soon be few expatriates in local governments. Yet whites, expatriate and local, dominated most economic enterprises, notably those that are subsidiaries of foreign firms. Ten béké [Creole or French-descendant] families own 80 percent of the cultivatable land in Martinique. In St. Vincent whites are only 2.3 percent of the population but they control the banks, the principal hotels, the newspaper and practically all the arrowroot estates, St. Vincent’s principal industry.19

Lowenthal also observes that, in contrast, the “colored” middle class typically controlled island governments and civil service20—his use of the term colored is critical, for the Caribbean has long made the distinction between coloreds/mulattoes and blacks. Growing up in this context, Eric Williams became well attuned to this critical dimension of social cleavage in the Caribbean. WiLLiams on The origins of coLor sTraTificaTion in The cariBBean

The sixth chapter of The Negro in the Caribbean, “The Middle Class and the Racial Problem,” focuses primarily on color and social stratification among people of African descent, but Williams also demonstrates a keen awareness of how other minority groups fit into the Caribbean scene: In the early years of slavery, the social divisions were extremely simple: at the top of the pyramid was the small handful of whites—owners and overseers; the base was the Negro slaves. Juxtaposition of the two races soon produced a third class. The slave had no legal rights; if the male slave was in most instances denied the privilege of marrying, the female slave was denied the right of refusing access to her bed on the part of her owner or his overseer. The refusal of sexual intercourse with a white overseer was equivalent to mutiny. It was no uncommon thing for a planter to line up his slave girls before his guest who was invited to take his choice for the night. The slave women were defenceless under the regime of slavery and the white man’s preoccupation with his slave women, his neglect of his white wife, and the tolerant attitude toward concubinage were responsible for no small part of the disgraceful cruelty of white women to slave girls.21

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Whether a slave woman was a concubine or wife—the latter more likely in the French- and Spanish-controlled islands than in the British—Williams asserts that “intercourse with slave women produced an increasingly large colored or mulatto element in all the islands.” In the 1700s, the Leeward Islands under British rule “made a profitable business out of rearing quadroon and octoroon girls and sending them to Dutch Guiana to be sold for the Caribbean harem.”22 In some cases the white planters were also known to free their mulatto children, again a practice more often exercised in the French and Spanish colonies. Certainly the window of opportunity for acquisition of schooling and property generally was greater for mulattoes than it was for enslaved blacks. Under slavery regimes, Williams contends, mulattoes grew in political importance. They played a central role in initiating the revolution in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) when they “[demanded] the political equality with whites to which their wealth and education entitled them and [they maintained an important] presence as property owners and as comparatively well-educated persons in Jamaica and Barbados.”23 Concomitantly, mulattoes typically sought to distance themselves from their African roots and the heritage of enslavement: This intermediate caste in slave society despised the black side of its ancestry. The mulatto woman preferred to be the mistress of a white man than the wife of a black man. With the prestige of white blood in their veins they [the mulattoes] refused to do laboring work. They despised the “no-good niggers,” and where, as in some cases, they themselves owned slaves, they were as vicious and tyrannical as the poor whites.24 This was the setting that provided the incubator for “the humble beginnings of the colored and black middle class in the Caribbean.”25 From the start, the nascent middle class’s status was entwined with mixed parentage and, generally, lighter skin shades. Emancipation and the end of slavery “gave a decided stimulus to this class.” Literacy rose among them, they moved into retail trade and commerce, their landholdings grew as they farmed cocoa or bananas, and their children were sent overseas to European universities to prepare for careers in medicine and law before “[returning] to their native land to monopolize the professions.”26 By 1940 the predominantly colored middle class was definitely well positioned in Caribbean society. The social and economic separation between

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them and the predominantly black lower class was pronounced. Williams documents this in The Negro in the Caribbean by describing a 1930s study that found that 80 percent of rural Haitians were dark skinned, while 40 to 50 percent of persons living in cities were light skinned. When members of the colored middle class were found to live in rural areas, “they figure[d] as landed gentry.” Williams concludes, “[The colored middle classes] are . . . essentially a professional people.”27 Williams also observes that the connection between the colored middle classes and their occupational niche in the professions was further reinforced by their displacement from the commercial sector by still-more-recent immigrants: The colored middle classes were [s]queezed out of retail trade by the waves of Chinese, Portuguese, Syrians, and Jews who have in that order invaded the Caribbean, and who today control the rum shops, dry goods stores, groceries, and luxuries.28 While Williams is incorrect about the timing of Jewish immigration to the Caribbean, and while he makes no mention of East Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, he is on the mark about the pervasive presence of the colored middle classes in these professions. Mulattoes dominated medicine and law in the British and French colonies, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and they dominated civil service and government positions throughout the entire Caribbean. Williams goes on to describe the deep cultural and social divide between mulattoes (the middle class) and blacks (the lower class) in the Caribbean. He describes mulattoes as Eurocentric “in training and outlook. . . . They retain little or no trace of their African origin except the color of their skin. Some have been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne, Madrid. They are colored Europeans.”29 Williams also comments that among the colored middle classes, the men “often marry white women, English, French, Spanish, Canadian, and American.” For these colored middle classes, “going home” referred not to a pilgrimage to Africa but to a visit to England, France, or Spain. Their savings were devoted to seeing a royal coronation, and a royal visit to the islands elicited displays of loyalty; the colored middle classes also actively remained ignorant about the other islands in the Caribbean.30 Eurocentrism on the part of the colored middle classes was also evidenced in their misplaced allegiances:

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In the days of slavery the role of the mulatto concubine was to inform against conspiracies of the field slaves in the Caribbean and the United States, while the free people of color, as a class, served as a social barrier between the slaves on the one hand and the owners on the other. In the present society of the Caribbean, the role of the people of color is by and large to collaborate, wittingly or no, with the dominant whites. The attitude of the majority of the colored middle class to the black workers is one of open contempt.31 Williams observes that during the 1930s, in the midst of heightened labor unrest throughout the West Indies, “the colored middle class, some of them working as clerks for $20 a month, rushed to volunteer for service against the black strikers.” He added: What an English observer [K. Pringle] has written of Jamaica is true of all the islands: “the Jamaican bourgeoisie knows even less about the people than the English bourgeoisie about its proletariat.” They are adamant in their refusal to countenance any extension of the franchise to “the barefooted man” who, they say sagely, is not yet ready for such a boon. No one in the British West Indies talks so glibly of the “lazy” black as his colored brother.32 Indeed, the scope of disenfranchisement of the black working classes was comprehensive well into the 1940s. In Williams’s native Trinidad, for instance, voter eligibility was contingent on earning more than $300 per annum; an agricultural laborer earned a mere 25 cents per day. Generally throughout the British West Indies, “high property qualifications disenfranchise[d] all but a handful of colored and white voters.”33 The consequences of these conditions were voting rolls that consisted of extraordinarily low percentages of the population. Among British West Indian countries, the highest proportion was found in Trinidad, and even there they amounted to just 6.6 percent of the population; Antigua, British Guiana, and Saint Lucia had voter rolls that numbered 3 percent or less of the population.34 Thus Williams identifies the comparatively advantaged status, power, and economic traits of the mulatto segments over those of blacks in Caribbean populations, traits that date to slavery times. The inclination of the colored middle classes to separate themselves from the rest of the black population was ferocious.

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WiLLiams and “coLorism” in The cariBBean

A later section of The Negro in the Caribbean discusses Marcus Garvey and further crystallizes the West Indian intersection between class and color stratification: While there was not much to be seen in the islands in the way of concrete organization, it is unquestionable that the Garvey Movement in the United States exercised an extraordinary stimulating effect upon Negro race consciousness among the poorer classes of the British West Indies. For Garvey’s appeal was not so much to the Negro in general, as to the man with a black skin in particular. The influence he exercised was almost exclusively confined to the masses, and the West Indian middle classes were, almost without exception, hostile.35 Of course, the black American middle classes were not particularly enthusiastic about Garveyism either, but Williams takes pains to distinguish the circumstances of racial disparity in the Caribbean from those in the United States. His observations now represent current conventional wisdom—albeit increasingly contested36—about alleged differences between the construction of race in the United States and in Latin America. For example, Williams notes, “If in the United States one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro, in the islands one is white or not according to the color of one’s skin.”37 And, in a more elaborate anecdotal discussion of the same theme, he asserts: If in the United States one is classified as a Negro if his Negro ancestry goes back to the fourth generation, then in the Caribbean one is considered white in the second generation. A common remark in the British West Indies of colored schoolboys to a companion of lighter skin whom they consider uppish is: “Go home and look at your grandmother.” There is a similar saying in Puerto Rico in a popular song which says: “And your grandmother, where is she?”38 Thus Williams embraces the mythology of a dichotomous construction of race between the United States and the Caribbean—race as purely genotypical in the United States and as purely phenotypical in the Caribbean.39 He proposes that, unlike in the United States, no extended history of “overt legal discrimination” or atrocities such as the postemancipation lynching of

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blacks existed in the Caribbean. Nor was there a system of racially separate schools, restricted access to public accommodations, separate attendance at church, or separate burial sites.40 Peculiarly, he also notes that “cases of rape of white women are unknown,” as if to intimate this was commonplace in the United States. He ultimately contends that “the racial consciousness which permeates the American Negro is also not found in the islands.”41 However, what Williams does acknowledge as a permeating Caribbean sentiment is “colorism”: an intense preference and premium attached to lighter skin. Williams argues that lighter skin translates into pecuniary benefits, that is, those associated with greater access to middle-class status. Some dimensions of colorism border on the absurd: A white skin, in a society still obsessed economically and therefore culturally by the slave tradition, is an indication of social status and the best passport to political influence. The nearer one is to the coveted white skin, the more likely is one to be accepted in society. If one is not fortunate enough to have white skin, the next best thing is to marry a partner with white skin. It is this high market value of white skin, in addition to the stigma of past slavery and its consequences, which is responsible for those color distinctions for which islands are notorious [italics mine]. Prospective brides look for light-skinned men. They pray for “light” children, who marry white. Expectant mothers abstain from coffee or chocolate.42 Ironically, one of Williams’s biographers, Ken Boodhoo, suggests that Williams himself was not devoid of some variant of Caribbean colorism. For example, when urged to remarry by political associates in 1957, four years after the death of his second wife Soy Suilan Moyou, allegedly “Eric replied, in all seriousness, ‘I don’t mind. But bring me a Chinese or East Indian; don’t bring me a Negro woman.’”43 Regardless of Williams’s color and ethnic preferences in his personal life, his analysis in The Negro in the Caribbean does provide a case for the grievance and compensation of those at the bottom of the Caribbean color-caste ladder. But he never seizes the conclusions that naturally follow from a perspective that led some readers to dub the Eric Williams of The Negro in the Caribbean a mere “race man.” Though he continues to distance Caribbean racial experience and attitudes from those in the United States toward the close of “The Middle

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Class and the Racial Problem,” Williams expresses great concern that race/ color identification could deepen cleavages in West Indian society. Indeed, he attributes the rise in Caribbean racial tensions to the importation of attitudes about race from other parts of the world, not the indigenous connection between color status, income, and power forged in the Caribbean’s own historical processes. Thus Williams contends that the employment of white southerners and white South Africans in the oil fields of Trinidad introduced foreign forms of racism there, and he argues that white American tourists in Havana injected a demand for racial separation ostensibly heretofore absent in Cuba.44 In addition, Williams asserts that “racial prejudice was infinitesimal in the Spanish colonies, especially Puerto Rico,” until the impact of “American rule and influence” altered conditions there. While grossly underestimating the degree of racism in Latin America—which also entails underestimating the full implications of his own historical analysis—Williams evidently views the Caribbean’s intense colorism as a much softer form of racism than the one practiced in the United States.45 Williams is not consistently correct (or prescient) in the pages of The Negro in the Caribbean. In addition to tabling a closer examination of racism in Latin America, he also glosses over examples from other Caribbean nation-states. For example, he is largely overly optimistic in his observation that “it is a healthy sign that attempts to play off Indians against Negroes in the British colonies have so far not succeeded.”46 Subsequent developments in Guyana—an intense political divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese still almost perfectly aligns with the two political parties—certainly proved him wrong.47 Again, near the close of “The Middle Class” chapter of the book, Williams also expresses genuine nervousness about the consequences of increasing race consciousness among the downtrodden: The Negro in Cuba, the mulatto in the Dominican Republic, is being undercut by cheap black labor from Haiti and Jamaica. Obviously, therefore, one must be wary of too sweeping a racial interpretation of Caribbean history. But there is dynamite in the racial situation. Essentially the difference between capital and labor in the Caribbean is a difference between black and white, and the significant increase of racial consciousness which followed on the Italo-Ethiopian war is a portent which will bear watching.48

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Here Williams perhaps foretells an admonition for incipient black nationalists: “Excessive emphasis on the racial issue is as dangerous in the black man as it is in the white.”49 WiLLiams and The BLack revoLT in Trinidad

The Eric Williams of The Negro in the Caribbean was the Eric Williams who was still based in the academy as a young professor at Howard University. He was still a few steps away from becoming the preeminent political figure on the West Indian stage. The Eric Williams who was prime minister of Trinidad contended that the way to eliminate racism was to eliminate race consciousness. His posture as a political leader was not far removed from the concerns he expressed in The Negro in the Caribbean about “excessive emphasis on the racial issue [by] the black man.”50 Presumably, Williams’s position was consistent with the pragmatic requirements of state building in a newly independent nation that could potentially be divided along ethnic lines. This is understandable, for Williams had before him a deep cultural divide between two virtually numerically equal segments of Trinidad’s population. Both groups, citizens of African ancestry and those of East Indian heritage, have their own historical wells of grievance. The hope was that sectionalism would be transcended by Trinidadian nationalism or, better still, a supranationalistic West Indian communalism. At the time of independence, Williams would not countenance the legitimacy of ethno-nationalism, not even as a means of resistance to the colorism and inequality he explores so forcefully in The Negro in the Caribbean. He explicitly called for the dissolution of ethnic identities under the consumption of a national identity: There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India. . . . There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin. . . . There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties. . . . There can be no Mother China even if one could agree as to which China is the mother; and there is no Mother Syria and no Mother Lebanon. A nation like an individual can have only one mother. The only mother we recognize is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and Mother cannot discriminate between her children.51

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The foregoing passage echoes the substance of Williams’s rhetoric in a speech given on August 16, 1955, titled “Historical Background of Race Relations in the Caribbean” at the fabled University of Woodford Square: The Caribbean teaches us that man in the West Indies is more than white, more than mulatto, more than Negro, more than Indian, more than Chinese. He is West Indian, West Indian by birth, West Indian by customs, West Indian in dialect or language, West Indian in aspirations. I say to the young men and women in particular of Trinidad and Tobago that our democratic development . . . has no colour. It has no little Negroes, no little whites, no little Indians, no little Chinese, it has only West Indians.52 In the sardonic “Massa Day Done,” perhaps Williams’s most famous Woodford Square lecture, delivered on March 22, 1961, he introduced a rhetorical device that was central to his political party’s position on the race question, that is, “interracial solidarity”: We of the PNM . . . have been able to incorporate into our People’s National Movement people of all races and colours and from all walks of life, with the common bond of a national community dedicated to the pursuit of national ends without special privileges being granted to race, colour, class, creed, national origin, or previous condition of servitude.53 Williams’s stance ruled out de facto not only formal advantages for the historically privileged minorities in the Caribbean but also the debt owed to the majority of Trinbagonians by the legacy of slavery and colonialism, the very legacies that produced the myriad of contemporary disparities. Moreover, Williams’s posture also ruled out the adoption of policies to redress ongoing discrimination against either Afro- or East Indian Trinidadians, since presumably such discrimination could not exist in the absence of Jim Crow–type laws. Thus the early 1960s saw Williams embracing a purely “equal opportunity” principle, a meritocratic ideal closely allied with the ideology of a “colorblind” society. Somewhat oddly, this perspective finds common cause with latter-day African American neoconservatives like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele. Redress for past and current injustices that are

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group specific cannot be undertaken under a color-blind regime. In contrast, a “color-fair” regime would identify and compensate those who suffer(ed) penalties due to their “race, class, creed, national origin or previous condition of servitude.”54 Of course, the chickens had not yet come home to roost in the early 1960s. But they did in 1970 in the form of the deepest crisis of Williams’s career as prime minister: Trinidad’s Black Power revolt. This Trinidadian uprising occurred after Williams had already spoken favorably about black power among African Americans. Perhaps it was easier to give lip service to a black power movement in a predominantly white country, one at the center of global imperialism, as opposed to doing so in a predominantly black country at the periphery of global imperialism. Indeed, to stretch the question further, why would a black power movement arise in a black country with black leadership, and how does one address it? Williams’s speech on March 23, 1970, his first official reaction to the disturbances preceding his declaration of a state of emergency, outlined his strategic response. He acknowledged the legitimacy of the grievances, sought to contain their expression in manageable (i.e., legitimate) channels, and then identified policies to address the grievances that were not race or group specific.55 In particular, Williams linked the unrest to high levels of youth unemployment and then explored steps to reduce joblessness among all young adults. Simultaneously he defined who was “black” as inclusively as possible, merging the grievances associated with historic slavery of Afro-Trinidadians, the primary agents of the uprising, with those of the historically indentured East Indian Trinidadians: Let us proceed to work more positively than ever towards the economic and social upliftment of the Black disadvantaged groups in our society of both African and Asian origin, as the only way to achieve the genuine national integration to which so many of us are dedicated.56 Still, Williams’s intense awareness of history—the same history he had taught in his own writings and at Woodford Square, a history that helped fuel the uprisings—did not allow him to maintain a wholly unwavering philosophical opposition to group-based compensation, even in this momentous and carefully crafted speech, even with the “black man” defined to include at least 80 percent of Trinidadians. He also mentions the great paradox of emancipation upon nearing the speech’s closing:

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In 1833 the British abolished slavery in their colonies. The British Parliament voted £20 million compensation. The compensation went to the planters for the loss of their property and not to the slaves for the indignities they had suffered.57 Implicit in Williams’s observation is the recognition that something was due the slaves and their descendants. The penultimate passage of his speech even alludes to the need to develop a program designed to lift up black Trinidadians: The recognition of the rights of humanity must commence with special assistance to the Black man, to make up for historical injustice and the time lost through his exclusion from the economic and social, and even political, progress of the nineteenth century. The political independence of Africa, India, and Pakistan gives him greater strength than he had in the nineteenth century. I know of no country in the world better circumstanced than Trinidad and Tobago to initiate this fundamental reconstruction which the entire world today faces [italics mine].58 But Williams’s philosophical recognition of the correctness of “special assistance” to “the Black man” did not translate into a program of action, whether more narrowly or expansively defined for black Trinidadians. The prosperity born of the good fortune of the oil price boom in 1973–74 may have defused the macroeconomic factors contributing to Trinidad’s Black Power revolt. Coupled with Williams’s repressive response toward the younger architects of the Black Power Movement, the oil price boom may have reduced the pressure for a Trinidadian version of affirmative action or reparations. Suffice it to say that Williams, a scholar-intellectual deeply aware of the long history of color-based inequality in the Caribbean—indeed, the figure who brought those issues to explicit light—never forged an agenda designed to remedy the injustices. This is no surprise. Other leaders in many other countries, even under considerably less precarious conditions, have failed to do so as well.

noTes 1. D. Brown, “Ethnic Politics and Public Sector Management.” 2. Coppin and Olsen, “Earnings and Ethnicity in Trinidad and Tobago,” 124–29. 3. Ibid., 121.

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4. Holzberg, “Social Organization of Jamaican Political Economy,” 320. 5. Van der Mark, “Marriage and the Family in a White Caribbean Elite,” 119. 6. Holzberg, “Social Organization of Jamaican Political Economy,” 319–20. 7. Ibid., 328. 8. Van der Mark, “Marriage and the Family in a White Caribbean Elite,” 122. 9. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America. 10. Johnson, A History of the Jews, 250. 11. Ibid. 12. Levenson, “In New World, Jamaica Was First Stop,” 23. 13. Lancaster, “Skin Color, Race, and Racism in Nicaragua,” 339–40. 14. Ibid., 342. 15. Ibid., 341. 16. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door, 127–48. 17. Lowenthal, “Race and Color in the West Indies,” 597. 18. “Jamaica Says Black Is Beautiful.” 19. Lowenthal, “Race and Color in the West Indies,” 604. 20. Ibid. 21. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), 57. 22. Ibid., 57–58. 23. Ibid., 58. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 59. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 60. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 61. 32. Ibid., 62. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 92–93. 36. For a discussion of this contestation, see Darity, Hamilton, and Dietrich, “Passing on Blackness?”; Rivera-Batiz, “Color in the Tropics.” 37. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), 63. 38. Ibid., 63–64. 39. Recent empirical studies of patterns of racial self-classification on the part of Latinos and Puerto Ricans in the contiguous United States and on the island debunk this mythology (see Darity, Hamilton, and Dietrich, “Passing on Blackness?”; Rivera-Batiz, “Color in the Tropics”). 40. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), 62, 64. 41. Ibid., 63. 42. Ibid., 64–66.

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43. Boodhoo, The Elusive Eric Williams, 147. 44. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), 67. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 68. 47. G. K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, 257–88. 48. Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), 67–68. 49. Ibid., 67. 50. Ibid. 51. Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 203. 52. Ibid., 210. 53. Ibid., 216. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 162–67. 56. Ibid., 166. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 167.

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chapter 6

The good, The Bad, and The ugLy eric Williams and the Labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago, 1955–1981 Jerome TeeLucksingh

Eric Williams’s earliest exposure to the struggles of the working class came while he was at Oxford University conducting his doctoral research on slavery. The intellectual journey of the young Williams took him through the dark caverns of West Indian slavery as he analyzed labor exploitation in its cruelest forms. In his classic work on the economic aspects of slavery, Capitalism and Slavery (first published in 1944), he gave a new perspective to labor history in the colonial era. He focused particularly on metropolitan objectives fueled by excessive greed, which enriched Europe but mercilessly destroyed an enslaved people and ravished natural and human resources in both Africa and the Americas. Eventually Williams’s intellectual curiosity developed into a twenty-fiveyear political career (1956–81). During this time, his relationship with the working class evolved from acceptance to antagonism. Initially he supported and partnered with the labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago. Through the years, he came to grasp the challenge that a united labor movement would pose to his administration and party. Circumstances and personalities partly contributed to a shift in Williams’s island politics, one that embraced a conservative governing perspective and shied away from radical labor movements. Despite collective political forces, Williams propelled Trinidad and Tobago into sovereign independence. During his years at Howard University in Washington, DC (1938–48) lecturing in the political science department, Williams prepared for the political career he would have back home. After some disappointment at the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (renamed the Caribbean Commission), where he worked from 1942 to 1955, he had one final assignment before he was to “let his bucket down” at Woodford Square in Port of Spain for the next twenty-five years: learning about labor abroad.1 126

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Williams gained valuable work experience with one of the world’s most celebrated labor organizations, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). In 1955 he began his work as adviser to the ICFTU, with other responsibilities that included consulting for the International Labour Organisation (ILO). He was appointed secretary to the workers on the ICFTU’s conference subcommittee that dealt with “possible measures within countries and industries concerned in stabilizing employment and earnings of plantation workers.”2 The ICFTU was impressed with Williams’s work and offered him the further assignment of presenting a two-part report to the ICFTU’s executive board in 1955. Williams was informed that, depending on the quality of the report, it would be presented to the ILO Conference in Geneva in October 1955. This report centered on a topic with which Williams was quite familiar: plantation economies. Williams subsequently noted: “My work here has been based for the most part on the assessment of the various plantation workers’ resolutions in the light of ILO provisions and developments in the plantation countries.”3 Williams traveled to Geneva in November 1955 and held discussions with ILO officials regarding the assignment, which asked questions about international standards for plantation workers. Not surprisingly, Williams received a favorable and encouraging response: “The ILO officials were enthusiastic over the undertaking. It will almost certainly lead to my attendance at other plantations conferences, if they can be fitted into my programme and schedule.”4 The two parts of the ICFTU report were pamphlets titled International Standards for Plantation Workers and The ICFTU and the Plantation Worker. Williams’s knowledge and critical assessment of the world of labor resulted in the onerous responsibilities of speaking at both the ICFTU and the ILO annual conferences, as well as serving as general adviser to ICFTU’s workers. The organization regarded Williams as its most prominent speaker, and his 1955 ILO Annual Conference speech was well received by everyone in attendance—with the exception of the Trinidad and Tobago delegation. This negative feedback did not deter Williams, and he optimistically stated, “There is much work ahead, with my ICFTU commitments and other ideas propose[d] here. The holiday committee sessions are indispensable.”5 In these international arenas, Williams was admired and respected by trade unionists, labor leaders, and policy makers alike. Also, while conducting research for the ICFTU in London, Williams expanded his network of friends. Through these contacts, he could easily have embarked on a career

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abroad, or with organizations like ICFTU and ILO, or as a labor adviser to another country. But his contributions in this sphere were to end abruptly; the decision of this brilliant speaker and labor analyst to become involved in the party politics of Trinidad and Tobago was quite definitely a major loss for the international labor movement. Upon his return to Trinidad in 1956, Williams was valued both as a speaker and as an adviser for various worker groups and trade unions. Subsequently these commitments forced him to delay the completion of the ICFTU’s report. In a letter to J. H. Oldenbrook, general secretary of the ICFTU, Williams revealed the large number of requests he was receiving from persons like Oli Mohammed of the colony’s sugar union: In addition he has enlisted my aid in talks to sugar workers in connection with his union’s efforts both to retain its members and get new ones in the face of increase in union dues. I have spoken to workers in their thousands at St. Madeleine, where Walcott also spoke, and at Chaguaramas, and as soon as I can find the time I have arranged to go to speak at Picton on trade unionism to people who are principally field workers. . . . Over and above this, I have had several meetings with fishermen in Cedros who want to form a union, with seamen in the overseas trade who are not catered for by [Cecil] Alexander’s union, and with the steelbandsmen who have an association of sorts which so far has done nothing, while I have arranged to meet as soon as possible some workers on coconut estates who are considering the desirability of organising themselves. In all cases I have been asked to be the President of the Union concerned, but I have declined and I am limiting my assistance to technical advice.6 When he launched his political career in 1955, Williams’s series of lectures throughout the country included a tirade against Crown Colony government as he presented proposals for constitutional reform. Colin Palmer contends that, in speaking to dispossessed residents in the suburbs of Port of Spain, Williams was shaping their “political consciousness” and assisting in the “mental regeneration of a people.”7 Unfortunately their status in the lowest rungs of society was to continue while Williams became prime minister. During the seven-year period from 1955 to 1962, Williams persisted in his demand for self-government for Trinidad and Tobago. He finally received the Independence Charter at Marlborough House, London, in June 1962. Ironically, he won the charter with no battle at Marlborough House, which

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was a common venue for colonial leaders.8 In fact, his only opponent was not the secretary of state for the colonies but Dr. Rudranath Capildeo, leader of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), Williams’s opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. Later, Williams proudly asserted that the first real achievement of his government was “the abolition of the Crown Colony system.”9 In retrospect, the real heroes of independence, the true soldiers of the movement for responsible government, and the true pioneers of nationalism were neither Williams nor the colony’s political leaders of the 1960s but rather the labor leaders of the preceding decades. Labor was the most formidable protagonist against colonial governance in the pre-Williams era. It was the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA) between 1897 and 1932, and then subsequent trade union leaders, that consistently called for self-government in both Port of Spain and London.10 Whether in consultations with colonial authorities or the Legislative Council, or through violent protests, the colony’s working class was relentless in this pursuit. When the colony was granted independence in 1962, it was the scarred warriors of an earlier era—William Howard Bishop, Captain Andrew Cipriani, Timothy Roodal, Adrian Cola Rienzi, and Tubal Uriah Butler—who had laid the groundwork and procured for Williams’s generation easy access to independence. Indeed, Williams claimed the credit for the island’s victory but grudgingly gave praise to Cipriani, Butler, and Patrick Solomon when he said, “These three will go down in our history as the great trinity in our movement for self-government.”11 But Williams did not hesitate also to pour scorn on their efforts when he said that they had labored “only to produce the barren fruit of [Trinidad and Tobago politician] Albert Gomes.”12 Furthermore, greater insult was added to Cipriani and Butler when Williams included Solomon on that list of persons contributing to self-government. Both Cipriani and Butler contributed to nation building during the 1920s and 1930s. Butler’s role in the 1937 riots was infused with a mission larger than that of protest and violent demonstration. Indeed, Butler advocated not only the implementation of infrastructure to improve working conditions in the colony but also increased political representation of the working class. He was a firm advocate for self-government. In fact, Butler’s political organization, the British Empire Workers’ and Citizens’ Home Rule Party, was not only a workers’ party but also a home rule party. It is no wonder that sometimes the only rival to Williams for the title of “Father of the Nation” is Tubal Uriah Butler.

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6.1 Famed trade union leader Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler being conferred with Trinidad and Tobago’s most prestigious national award, the Trinity Cross, by Governor General Sir Solomon Hochoy and Prime Minister Eric Williams. Photograph courtesy of the Ministry of Communications, Trinidad and Tobago.

LaBor’s Tremors

By the 1950s, the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) was the strongest and best-organized union in Trinidad and Tobago. Undoubtedly the OWTU was the mainspring of the island’s economy, and thus its leadership was crucial for the direction and future of the trade union movement. Williams’s erstwhile colleague and former teacher C. L. R. James served as editor of the Nation, the newspaper of the People’s National Movement (PNM). However, cordial relations soon soured as both men advocated divergent political visions: [ James’s] partnership with his former student and friend Williams came to an end as a result of the break-up of the West Indies Federation and, more particularly, as a result of Williams’s rejection of a nonaligned position, in favour of the USA and its retention of the Chaguaramas Naval Base.13

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James’s activities were also a cause of concern among PNM party members who felt he was spreading communist ideas among its members, allowing Marxism to enter the party. In 1961, while James was editor of the Nation and a strong supporter of the PNM, he addressed regular meetings organized by George Weekes and Walter Annumunthodo and other OWTU members who were also members of the PNM. John Rojas, president general of the OWTU, disagreed with James’s political philosophy and his incursion into the trade union movement. Rojas’s failure to be more accommodating to these new ideas and changes within the movement led to the end of his presidency in 1961. In an August 1962 Senate speech, Rojas revealed that Marxists were operating in some of the trade unions on the island. He further described the meetings between James and OWTU “communist cells” in Fyzabad, Pointea-Pierre, and San Fernando. Rojas exposed the existence of “study cells” within the OWTU that attracted the radical and more-educated elements of the trade unions. Last, Rojas referred to a conversation the month prior during OWTU’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in which James said a Trinidadian revolution would begin within eighteen months.14 Williams was equally concerned with the potential communist bent of the OWTU. At an October 1966 meeting of the PNM in San Fernando, Williams assured his listeners that he would crush any Marxist movement in Trinidad; one newspaper reported: “He said the Marxist group had started their activities in the sugar belt, using the workers there as ‘pawns.’”15 Williams hinted that this was one of the reasons why his government had to institute the Industrial Stabilization Act (ISA). These political pressures soon led James to break ranks with the PNM. Subsequently he openly criticized the tactics and governance of Williams. It seemed inevitable that James would form his own political party using the working class as his base: “It became necessary for him politically to challenge Williams, but it was too late. He had been known earlier as a coming writer and not as a political figure.”16 James’s departure from the PNM, Rojas’s discomfort with him in the OWTU, and his burgeoning association with the labor movement created a rich environment for James to plant his own political seeds. James did indeed possess the qualifications necessary to become a powerful ally of the colony’s labor movement. His international ties with labor organizations in the United States and Europe made him knowledgeable of their operations, tactics, and strategies. This included his friendship with George Padmore, another prominent Trinidadian in the international black

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working-class movement, an advantageous alliance for James as he persevered to unite the workers of Trinidad and Tobago. James had also emerged from the heart of the PNM, and his knowledge of the ruling party’s strengths and weaknesses was seen by those in the labor movement as an important advantage in the ongoing struggle between laborers and the government. Now he sought to define the course of the colony’s labor movement as an answer to its perceived enemy: the scholarly Eric Williams. In August 1965, James, Dalip Gopeesingh, and Stephen Maharaj formed the short-lived Workers and Farmers Party (WFP), which was formally launched in October 1965. James was also the founder and editor of the WFP’s paper, We the People. George Bowrin’s article in OWTU’s paper the Vanguard made the bold statement that the PNM had “lost its magic”; the DLP was “demoralised”; and the Butler Party was “a name only.” Bowrin was attempting to strengthen this new party and advised that “the W.F.P must offer a programme which promises real change if it is to receive substantial support from the people.”17 The WFP persisted in its condemnation of the Williams’s regime, but its grandiose plans failed to materialize at the polls in the 1966 elections. The party received only 3.5 percent of the popular vote and lost all its candidates’ deposits. In Tunapuna, the birthplace of James, the defeated candidate received only 2.8 percent of the vote. Despite its idealistic ambitions and claims of being the true representative of labor, the WFP never developed comprehensive linkages with Trinidad’s working class. An article by Panday warned, “If you are employed with Government you had better not let it be known that you are a member of WFP. Worse still if you are unemployed and looking for work—so much for your right to join political parties of your choice.”18 Labor’s political ambitions and its challenge to Williams reached their zenith with the formation of the United Labour Front (ULF) on February 18, 1975. The ULF was able to secure ten of the thirty-six contested seats and become the official opposition in Parliament. The ULF functioned under the triumvirate leadership of Weekes, Raffique Shah of the Islandwide Cane Farmers Union, and Panday of the All Trinidad Sugar and General Workers Trade Union. On March 18, 1975, the ULF attempted a religious march from San Fernando to Port of Spain; thirty-seven persons were arrested by the prime minister’s forces, among them union leaders Shah, Panday, Weekes, and Joe Young. Williams’s actions now seemed similar to those of the “massa” he had ridiculed fifteen years earlier at Woodford Square: “This was Massa . . .

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deliberately stunting all the economic potential of the society, dominating his defenceless workers by the threat of punishment or imprisonment. . . . Massa stood for the degradation of West Indian labour.”19 Perhaps unknowingly, Williams had donned the mask of Massa in his suppression of labor’s voice. One month later, on April 22, Weekes, Shah, and Panday were found not guilty on the charge of leading a public march without police permission. Such animosity from the Williams regime was a concerted attempt to eclipse the political vision of three of the country’s major unions: the OWTU, the WFP, and the ULF. But the prime minister’s fear that the political strength of the ULF would challenge the PNM was soon dismissed when the ULF showed signs of disunity and Panday was ousted in August 1977. Labor’s experimental political coalition had failed. Between 1960 and 1964, there were 230 trade disputes involving 74,574 workers with a loss of 803,899 workdays in Trinidad. The discontent of workers was clearly evident. On April 21, 1969, more than 650 workers went on strike against the Public Transport Service Corporation (PTSC). In the “Bus Strike of 1969,” several union members were fined, including the PTSC’s president Joe Young, WFP leader Stephen Maharaj, Weekes of the OWTU, Carlton Rosemin, and Transport and Industrial Workers Union (TIWU) officers Sylvester Mondesir and Krishna Gowandan. The president of the Trinidad and Tobago Labour Congress, senator Clive Spencer, warned that the labor movement would not allow a lockout of workers by the PTSC. The striking bus workers sought to confront and embarrass the prime minister about the ongoing crisis. The Trinidad Guardian reported on the union’s tactics: A demonstrator outside the magistrates’ building had an anti–Dr. Eric Williams poster. The bus-workers union announced in Woodford Square that it would picket all public appearances by the Prime Minister starting from this afternoon with his Meet the Farmers’ tour in La Pastora Santa Cruz.20 The public responses to the protests included sympathy for Williams. For instance, during the bus strike, a Tobagonian reader named Wiltshire wrote a letter to the editor of the Express, stating that the strike was really a struggle for political power by the trade unionists. Wiltshire appealed for the government’s intervention: “It is high time that government do something positive

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to bring this act of illegality to an end and restore sanity and balance in the society.”21 Certain sections of the public had lost sympathy for the constant strike action by unions. For instance, a letter in the Trinidad Guardian expressed dissatisfaction with the state of affairs: “I hope and pray that one day I will hear a trade union leader requesting workers to give an honest day’s work instead of demanding a 120 percent pay rise, cost-of-living boons, traveling allowance, more sick leave, and a two-day work week.”22 The OWTU was particularly severe in its response to the Williams regime. James initiated a political renaissance for the OWTU, believing that the OWTU was well equipped for the political deliverance of the country: The OWTU is fighting the battle of democracy, of parliamentary democracy in Trinidad and Tobago. If the OWTU goes down, not only Union rights go down; the liberties of every citizen of Trinidad and Tobago will not only be in peril, they will be tottering on the edge of extinction.23 At a conference organized by the editorial team of the Vanguard, at Palm’s Club, San Fernando, James advised that the OWTU’s newspaper should be a weekly paper and undertake the responsibility of educating the public about themes such as West Indian history, creative arts, and sociological analysis. James elaborated on the publication’s role: The Vanguard must see itself as filling a breach no one else in sight can fill. It is a union paper and it has to inform and educate labour and the public on all union matter[s]. . . . Labour has to win over large sections of the population, particularly in an under-developed country, i.e., where organised labour is small.24 It was evident that James was attempting to consolidate the forces of labor and mobilize the OWTU into a formidable opponent of the PNM. The OWTU did not hide its hostility toward Eric Williams and his policies. The union often quoted from his earlier statements to demonstrate his apparent two-faced nature on matters relating to labor. Williams’s views were usually confined to a Vanguard column titled “The Doctor Said.” For instance, at the height of the controversy over the ISA, the OWTU quoted from The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago, in which Williams seemed then sympathetic to labor:

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We repudiate unambiguously, the indefensible efforts of the Ministers to intimidate the trade unions, split the workers’ ranks, and set themselves up as little demigods recognising only those they consider amenable. That road leads straight to totalitarianism.25 Likewise, on September 3, 1965, after repeated demands for wage increases, the Vanguard printed a Williams commentary as it had appeared in the PNM’s paper the Nation on July 29, 1960: “The increase of wages in the oil industry is not lost to the country. Not at all. The workers will spend the money in the country.”26 Williams’s masterpiece, Capitalism and Slavery, made him famous in academia but was seen by some Trinbagonian trade unionists as an attempt to undermine the labor movement. In an article in the Vanguard, the economist Bernard Primus criticized Williams: “It is almost natural that the Government and the Chamber of Commerce should have labor and trade unions as the whipping boy for all the economic ills of the country. This is the same old story told so well in Dr. Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery.”27 Nevertheless, the prime minister’s works were also used in a positive manner in the Vanguard; one such example is the excerpt from History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago in which Butler was identified as one of three persons contributing to the movement for self-government.28 In a similar fashion, E. R. Ramsahai, vice president of the Federation Chemical Branch, OWTU, wrote about the 1937 riots based on excerpts from the same book.29 But the unions were, by and large, against their prime minister. Williams’s alleged double standards were constantly discussed in union publications, especially in terms of the ISA in 1965. In May of that year, the Vanguard published Williams’s statement of March 13, 1963: “Each party would pledge itself to the promotion, maintenance, and, above all, enforcement of proper civilized industrial relations based on collective bargaining.”30 The OWTU viewed this as a pledge by Williams to not interfere in the relations between employer and employees, and refrain from creating laws to ban strikes and demonstrations. Palmer sought to defend the shortcomings of the Williams regime when he argued, “Centuries of neglect could not be solved in a few years despite governmental will and the best of intentions.”31 Vas Stanford, president general of the Union of Commercial and Industrial Workers (UCIW), believed there would be an “explosion” if the ISA continued to exist. The oppressive legislation resulted in a temporary accord among unions, and a joint action committee charged with repealing the ISA was formed of TIWU, OWTU, the National Union of Government

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Employees (NUGE), and the National Union of Foods, Hotels, Beverages, and Allied Workers. In Inward Hunger, Williams exposed what he perceived was an attempt by subversive forces to unite the major sectors of the working class: The subversive elements in the society, with James in the forefront, were at work; the background was an open attempt to link the trade unions in oil and sugar. I therefore presented a bill to provide for the compulsory recognition by employers of trade unions and organisations representative of a majority of workers, for the establishment of an expeditious system for the settlement of trade disputes, for the regulation of prices of commodities, for the constitution of a court to regulate matters relating to the foregoing and incidental thereto.32 Statistics on work stoppages demonstrated that unions blatantly ignored the ISA. During 1970 there were fifty-five incidents of work stoppages, and January 1971 saw fifteen cases in which workers refused to work. This growing disenchantment prompted the government to draft the Industrial Relations Act (IRA) in 1971, but this measure failed to reduce the antagonism of labor; a year later the IRA of 1972 (Act No. 23) was passed to replace the ISA. The 1972 act defined the terms “union,” “worker,” “strike,” and “trade union” and established a “Registration, Recognition, and Certification Board.” More important, the legislation protected workers’ rights and offered freedom to the worker to join any union without fear of victimization from his or her employer. In Parliament, the DLP suspended two of its members for supporting the government on this seemingly oppressive labor legislation. During the Black Power era in Trinidad, the OWTU felt the full force of the government’s intolerance. Williams, then minister of national security under the Emergency Powers Act of 1970, seized the union’s books and victimized its officers. In April 1970, Weekes was detained, and other union members were arrested: Carl Douglas (assistant secretary, Palo Seco branch), Winston Lennard (education officer), Nuevo Diaz (labor relations officer), and Chan Maharaj (member of the Port of Spain branch). During this month, petrol bombs were thrown at the Vanguard’s printer, and an attempt was made to destroy its headquarters at the Paramount Building. On May 14 and 15, 1970, the police invaded the OWTU’s headquarters and printer and seized its books and records.

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The “days of terror” faced by the OWTU did not end in 1970. In August of the next year, at OWTU’s General Council meeting, Weekes and two members were arrested on fraud charges. At the court hearing on September 27, in a dramatic display, Weekes cut his clenched fist and chest with a razor and shouted, “In the name of the Black Indian and African masses and in protest against the corrupt Williams regime I shed my blood.”33 Despite the repressive measures of the Williams administration, the author Selwyn Ryan praises the manner in which the prime minister handled the labor protests and believes it superior to actions by other developing countries.34 Still, it seems contradictory that Williams would publicly boast that Trinidad and Tobago had “one of the most relaxed democracies in the Third World” and yet claim that “no one is locked up for attacking the government.”35 Further evidence suggests that Williams was concerned with maintaining power and thus ignored the interests of the workers. When protests among the oil and sugar industries occurred in 1975, Williams called out the defense force and police to ensure that sugar, gasoline, and petroleum products were available to the public. In the aftermath of these strikes, Williams publicly defended his actions: You keep shouting for all these years about dictatorship and then you find that people are saying, “Why does the government not do something to make petrol available?” If you want the freedom that we have, this is the price we have to pay. . . . If freedom means irresponsibility, too bad.36 Unfortunately the trade unions paid a heavy price, as this resulted in superficial freedom and token democracy for many working-class Trinidadians. Williams drew attention to the fact that he was not as harsh as the president of Venezuela, who, in 1975, fired striking oil workers when they failed to return to work.37 However, two years later Williams took a page from this book by firing British West Indian Airways pilots for allegedly undertaking an illegal strike. From 1960 to 1980, the unions fought among themselves, and serious schisms played out. Take, for example, the case of the TTNUC: in December 1957, two rival unions united to form the Trinidad and Tobago National Trades Union Congress (TTNUC), a forty-thousand-member organization with Rojas serving as president. Weekes succeeded Rojas in 1963, and his controversial tactics caused much friction, resulting in the departure

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of three TTNUC factions—the Amalgamated Workers’ Union and All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Trade Union (known as the ATSE+FWTU) and the Federated Workers Trade Union (FWTU)—to form the National Federation of Labour. A similar situation arose one year later when the Postal Workers and Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union (SWWTU) also withdrew from the TTNUC. Thus, by 1965, the only unions belonging to the TTNUC were the Communication and Transport Workers Trade Union, Government and Transport Workers Trade Union, OWTU, and NUGE. Due to ideological divisions and personality clashes, the split was deep. In June 1972, the president general of the Brotherhood of Construction and Industrial Workers’ Union criticized “fly-bynight” union leaders for “preaching a doctrine of hate,” and in July 1975, an election controversy within the Communication and Transport Workers’ Union resulted in the expulsion of four members. Attempts to increase union membership also were a source of controversy and contention. In November 1963, 635 members of the Civil Service Association defected to the SWWTU. A similar scenario unfolded in late 1974 when the Amalgamated Workers’ Union accused the Contractors and General Workers Trade Union of poaching its members. Upon learning of complaints by oil workers in Fyzabad in November 1975, the National Union of Federated and Government Workers (NUFGW) reportedly wooed the unhappy workers to join their Port of Spain–based union. Union leaders aspiring to the prized office of prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago were virtually unable to undermine PNM strongholds. By 1975, it was clearly evident that the machinery of the PNM, with its various committees, conventions, and party groups, greatly outmatched the WFP, DLP, and ULF. Racial cleavage between sugar and oil workers was not the only factor that weakened the cause of labor, but eventually race does largely explain PNM support from certain trade unions and working-class organizations. Unions with a large percentage of Afro-Trinidadians, like the Communications Workers Union (CWU), OWTU, and SWWTU, provided solid electoral support for Williams. In 1974, the SWWTU was the fifth-largest union organization, representing seven industries and holding a membership of 8,000 workers (2,021 of whom were employed on the Port of Spain dock). These union members, who were critical and protested against PNM policies, still offered electoral support to the party. Likewise, the NUGFW, which had a membership of 50,000 workers consisting mostly of urban blacks, was a staunch supporter of the PNM during the 1970s.38 The ULF, with its base of support in the sugar

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and southern oil industries, failed to defeat the PNM at the polls due to one prevailing factor: race. Indeed, union members supported their organizations in demonstrations, marches, and annual conventions. But labor’s political allegiances differed from its occupational actions. For example, at union meetings, an East Indian sugar union member would support the efforts of the ULF’s Panday or Shah to improve his working and living conditions; however, come Election Day, the same worker would vote for the DLP because of its Hindu orientation and incumbent East Indian leader. Likewise, Weekes would appear confident of electoral victory before the throngs at his many South Trinidad OWTU meetings; nevertheless most Afro-Trinidadians members held allegiance to the PNM. The Afrocentric nature of the PNM and the East Indian/Hindu-based DLP became social indicators of a still racially polarized post-colonial pluralist society. The mutual distrust and fears exhibited by both races since the onset of indentureship in 1845 had not disappeared. The quest for political power only served to perpetuate the polarization of the two major ethnic groups. It would be simplistic to believe that race was the sole determinant of Williams’s success. There were other political parties headed by Afro-Trinidadians, such as Lloyd Best of the Tapia House Movement and Arthur Robinson of the Democratic Action Congress, but they failed miserably to attract a significant percentage of the Afro-Trinidadian working class. Due to the wave of independence during the 1950s and thereafter, the leadership positions of chief ministers, premiers, and prime ministers of British West Indian territories were filled from the ranks of the trade union movement. In Jamaica, Alexander Bustamante emerged from the Bustamante Industrial Union, and his Jamaica Labour Party formed the government. Grantley Adams of the Barbados Labour Party served as president general of the Barbados Workers Union, Eric Gairy of the Grenada Labour Party was leader of the Grenada Manual and Metal Workers Union, and Vere Bird of the Antigua Labour Party became president of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union. Likewise, in British Guiana, Cheddi Jagan of the People’s Progressive Party had been the president of the Sawmill Workers Union. Only Williams and Trinidad were the exception. Selwyn Ryan notes Williams’s rejection of the union-party model and observes that the trade unions were already well developed before the founding of the PNM.39 Williams had indeed steered clear of any political association with the island’s trade unions before 1956. He understood the problems of

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interacting with the multiplicity of workers’ unions; most significantly, he understood the dangers of courting the major unions in the sugar and oil industries because of their different ethnic bases. It was a good strategy: avoiding political power sharing with labor enabled the PNM to extend its appeal to all sectors of society, most important of which was the growing middle class. With broad-based electoral support, Williams garnered his parliamentary majority in constituencies that lay outside the influence of major trade unions. Indeed, it was obvious that membership in Williams’s PNM, particularly for electoral purposes, transcended loyalty to any trade union. During the decades between 1960 and 1980, the fines levied on union members for marches and demonstrations, as well as their arrests, projected an image of Williams as anti–working class and anti–trade unionism. Despite charges of repression, he continued to maintain considerable popularity among the membership of unions and working-class organizations. Williams was able to skillfully maneuver domestic policies, and his lectures at the University of Woodford Square were sympathetic to the working class but emphasized the urgency for social stability. The formation of the PNM enabled Williams, as its political leader, to incorporate the knowledge and experience gained through his earlier work with the ICFTU and ILO. He incorporated representatives of labor in the General Council, the governing body of the PNM, and the party’s executive center. Among the persons holding positions of responsibility were Sam Worrell (labor relations secretary), Ulric Lee of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, and Mohammed of the sugar workers. Also included were workers from the communications, oil, seamen, and waterfront sectors. In a public lecture on June 14, 1956, at the University of Woodford Square, Williams highlighted his political party’s economic program, which involved the improvement of the fishing industry, expansion of secondary industries, development of foreign and local capital, assistance to small farmers, and provision of extra jobs for an expanding population. Williams also revealed aspects of the PNM’s Labour Programme that were in harmony with the objectives of trade unionism: It calls for the introduction into Trinidad and Tobago of the international standards worked out over the years by the International Labour Organisation. . . . The P.N.M policy is to bring the trade union leaders into the Central Executive, but to restrict the role of non-trade union members in union affairs to a purely advisory capacity. . . . The

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P.N.M through its trade union representatives, is associated with the I.C.F.T.U., the international trade union organisation of the democratic countries, and through it with the British T.U.C and the powerful A.F.L–C.I.O merger in the U.S.A.40 On November 20, 1959, the PNM chose Solomon Hochoy to be the governor of Trinidad and Tobago. This decision would have won valuable support from the labor movement and the working class. Hochoy had served as a civil servant and was a popular commissioner of labor. It was a strategic and wellplanned move that would set the stage for the transition to independence. In another of his public lectures at Woodford Square, on July 19, 1965, Williams championed the cause of political activity by trade union members: “The trade union element in any society is the bulwark of democracy. . . . The place for the trade unionist, his rightful place, is an elected member in the Lower House.”41 Almost a decade later, Weekes reiterated this view at a lecture at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad; he argued it was necessary for trade unions to be involved in politics as a result of “the breakdown of democracy.”42 Although the sugar industry employed mostly East Indians, there was a respect for the intellectual ability of Williams among that ethnic groups and their unions. The executive committee of the ATSE+FWTU invited Williams to address the sugar workers in 1955, and in his speech at Couva Recreation Ground, Williams addressed the problems facing the sugar industry: external markets, poor conditions of labor, and “reconciling the economic interests of the investor with the social needs of the community.”43 Williams envisioned the mechanization of the sugar industry and its subsequent challenges: Production per worker amounted to 5 tons in 1939 and 9 1/2 tons last year. Thus higher and higher productivity coincide with the employment of fewer workers. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the fact which you and your union must courageously face—that the raising of your standard of living depends, paradoxically enough, on the reduction of the labour force. . . . The sugar industry must mechanise or perish. Mechanisation will reduce costs. But it will also reduce jobs. The raising of the standard of living and the rate of wages of sugar workers depends on the preservation of the sugar industry, the retention of present markets and the securing of new ones and the reduction of the number of workers employed by the industry.44

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Williams had certainly simplified the basic principles of economics for his audience of workers, many of whom had only a primary school education, but he did so to show his understanding of their unique problems. Williams also sought the support of labor by including a union representative in his government. In 1965, Nathaniel Critchlow, president of the NUFGW, was appointed a PNM senator. However, Critchlow’s appointment was revoked after he opposed the government’s decision to compensate daily paid workers on a 60-40 cash-bond basis for their outstanding back pay. Critchlow was replaced by Carl Tull, another trade unionist. Tull had served in 1957 as the assistant general secretary of the CWU and later as chairman of the PTSC. In September 1968, Williams, at the Eleventh Annual PNM Convention, announced his administration’s plans to buy British Petroleum (BP). This was a result of the cabinet’s concern about the oil company’s proposed retrenchment of 1,650 workers over the coming five years.45 The decision to turn BP into the National Petroleum Company (NPC) was a major advance in the government’s oil policy. Interestingly, Williams did not spearhead this plan; OWTU president general Weekes, who had been campaigning for a national oil company, was its initiator. Though Williams had seemingly succumbed to Weekes’s NPC suggestion, he ignored the OWTU’s call for the nationalization of Texaco Trinidad Incorporated on April 11, 1975. Instead he acquired for his government all of Texaco’s gas stations in Trinidad and Tobago and took over the company’s domestic distribution. He was fortunate that during his regime new oil deposits were discovered and were accompanied by relatively high oil prices. Between these acts, in September 1969 John O’Halloran, minister of petroleum and mines, announced that Pan American Oil had again struck oil off the east coast of Trinidad. James firmly believed that Williams’s successful political life in the 1970s was due to oil: Let me tell you the prosperity in oil now experienced by this country had nothing to do with any policy of the Williams regime. It was a result of the decision by OPEC countries. And when they asked him to join, he refused. . . . In 1970, the whole country moved against him and in 1974 he was all ready to go because the country was bankrupt. The oil saved him. It saved everybody.46

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Yet Williams was always cautious in accepting advice from union leaders and left many other industries to their own devises. In 1975 his cabinet rejected the payment of $50 million for nongovernmental shares of the sugar company Caroni Limited, and Williams himself did not believe it was worth that amount.47 Panday, leader of the country’s main sugar union, criticized Williams’s plan to import sugar for its local market instead.48 At the PNM Annual Convention in September 1968, Williams highlighted the recent achievements of his government, among which were many that would have appealed to the working class: the reorganization of the Agricultural Development Bank that year, the establishment of the Public Utilities Commission in 1966, the introduction of the Social Insurance Scheme in early 1969, and tripartite discussions. Another move that won the support of labor was his designation of 1969 as “the Agriculture Year.” Williams promised that the government would make every effort to focus attention on agricultural development.49 That year he also launched celebrations to observe the fiftieth year of the ILO’s existence in an ongoing effort to revamp the image of the PNM party. He announced the awarding of two scholarships, one each from the country’s trade union and business sectors. This attempt to create a labor-friendly administration received a minor setback in November when it was revealed that the government had ratified only 10 of the 128 ILO conventions, ironic because Williams had once been associated with the ILO. In 1970, the year in which the OWTU faced victimization for its outspokenness, the government decided to seriously address the controversies surrounding the ISA. On August 28, 1970, the Nation ran an article about the outcome of ISA discussions between the prime minister and the Trinidad and Tobago Labour Congress; their decisions included the streamlining of procedures governing unions’ recognition, a relaxation of strike and lockout provisions, an enhanced status of the Labour Congress regarding issues such as interunion disputes, a registration of unions, and the continued existence of the Industrial Court.50 A noteworthy feature of this era was the formation of two unions: in 1974, the Bank Workers Trade Union, which claimed to be the first of its kind in the country, was formed; and in 1975, the National Union of Domestic Employees was founded to protect domestic servants, babysitters, barmen, messengers, yard boys, chauffeurs, and seamstresses. Williams gave some special attention to these smaller labor groups, as well as others. In an address titled “Government’s Role in the Management of Public Enterprises,” he shared his

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vision of agriculture in Trinidad and Tobago in 1976: “It is precisely because you have a big industrial revolution going on now in Trinidad, that one can anticipate an agricultural development. The essence of that agricultural development must be to take people away from land, which is not difficult.”51 The female labor force was also given special attention; in fact, the women’s arm of the PNM remained one of the party’s most effective and dependable units. In April 1976, Williams, in an address to the Federation of Women’s Institutes, stressed the importance of women to Trinidad’s economy. In another speech to the Business and Professional Women of Trinidad and Tobago, he emphasized the changes that had occurred in the lives of women: “The first is the women removed by technological advances on the one hand from the drudgery that’s associated with housekeeping. And on the other . . . the relief from the drudgery and chore of persistent child-bearing, especially when the child might not have been anticipated or planned or prepared for.”52 Williams championed gender equality in the occupational sphere, an interesting development in a historically patriarchal colonialist society. In an address at the formal opening of the Harmon High School in Tobago, he listed the many employment options his administration sought to gain for young girls in the name of equality: Not women in agriculture, though they make better farmers than men. Horticulture. Perhaps factory processing. Textiles. Garments. An extension of the curriculum in respect of home economics and sewing. Electronics. The proficiency of women, young girls with these intricate computer parts which we have found out in Trinidad. There’d be room for the girls as well as for the boys.53 Williams’s government consistently emphasized these and other initiatives to improve relations with labor. In the feature address of the second biennial conference of the SWWTU in 1976, he mentioned the importance of cooperation: I would make it explicit that in this tremendous economic transformation, restructuring one of the essential features partly in order to ensure the decision making remains in local hands, partly in order to deal with the inherent difficulties in Mr. [ James] Manswell’s claim about the old attitude of investment—private capital would be majority shareholding by the Government or by agencies working with the Government including the labour movement in all fields.54

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But the debate between government and the private sector on the subject of nationalizing industries continued, as a speech to the south branch of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce illustrates: Every day the government faces the question of, you are taking over something or other, I think right now it’s cement, possibly also the remaining shares of Caroni—apart from the fundamental issues raised by how is the government going to divest itself, if it is going to divest itself of any part of its shareholding and on what terms. Apart from that you have the question of Boards of Management. . . . Would the change of ownership merely be a question of the big car that used to be held by the expatriate manager being transferred now to some locality. Big car remains. Nationality and colour of manager change. Is that enough?55 The PNM sought to bridge the divisions between itself, business, and labor as it hosted tripartite conferences in 1964, 1966, 1967, and 1968. Panday interpreted the 1968 conference as an attempt by the government to stage a “grand deception”: This is the trap that Dr. Eric Williams has laid for labour. He gets labour’s representatives to sit down with him and lay down proposals for solving the economic problems. At first, labour is under the impression that it is there merely in an advisory capacity—to give him ideas of how to run the country. But subtlely labour’s role is being shifted from one of advice to that of commitment.56 In an attempt to remedy this situation, Williams offered some carrots, such as his economic adviser’s idea to have the government and business sectors offer technical and financial assistance to the country’s labor movement.57 But this reaching out was often halfhearted and not enthusiastically received. Selwyn Ryan has described Williams as “a poor manager of men and institutions” and has argued that the PNM over which Williams presided was “weak and ineffective.”58 This assessment could explain the frequency of protests and the government’s shabby treatment of labor. Patricia Mohammed viewed Williams as changing from “the benevolent patriarch to the distant and unforgiving patriarchal father.”59 This seems an accurate description of Williams when one considers his relationship with labor from 1955 to 1981.

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As a historian, Williams was undoubtedly sympathetic with the working class and understood the vicissitudes of workers under the yoke of colonialism. Indeed, he began his career as a friend of the labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago. As a politician, he knew the potential of a united labor movement if mobilized as a force against the PNM. Glimpses of his benevolence indicate cautious tokenism, as in his Senate appointments or the inclusion of labor representatives in PNM’s executive center. But Williams was always prepared to jealously guard the supremacy of his PNM. As prime minister, when his political position was threatened by labor or anyone else, he did not hesitate to take repressive measures. When labor invaded his arena of political power, there was little room for compassion or compromise. As a sworn nationalist, Williams not only identified radically, militantly, and politically inclined unionists as forces dangerous to national well-being but regarded them as enemies of the state. noTes 1. Williams, “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943–1955,” in Forged from the Love of Liberty, 280. For more on Williams’s early years, see also Samaroo, “Preparing for Politics,” 423–43. 2. Williams, “Letter to Wilfred, 23 October, 1955.” See also Williams, Inward Hunger (Deutsch edition), 140. 3. Williams, “Letter to Andrew, 14 November, 1955.” 4. Williams, “Letter to Donald, 25 November, 1955.” 5. Williams, “Letter to David, Walter and Andrew, 4 December, 1955.” 6. Williams, “Letter to J. H. Oldenbroek, 1 February, 1956.” 7. Palmer, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, 289. 8. See Samaroo, “The Race Factor,” 119–35. 9. Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (Deutsch edition), 244. 10. See Teelucksingh, “The Contribution of Labour,” 480. 11. Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 242. Williams also praised Cipriani and Butler at a rally in Woodford Square, Port of Spain, April 1960. 12. Ibid. For more on Gomes, see his Through a Maze of Colour. 13. Cited in Teelucksingh, “Black Massa or Liberator,” 6. For more on the relationship between James and Williams, see Boodhoo, The Elusive Eric Williams (Prospect Press edition), 154–68. While a member of the PNM, James greatly admired Williams; see James, “A Convention Appraisal,” in Cudjoe, Eric E. Williams Speaks, 331. 14. “C. L. R. James’s Perspectives on Pan-Africanism and Trade Unions,” in Teelucksingh, Caribbean Liberators, 175. 15. Bartley, “Williams: I’ll Crush the Marxists.”

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16. Cripps, C. L. R. James: Memories and Commentaries, 105. 17. Bowrin, “Political Parties,” 5. 18. Panday, “Human Rights amidst Inhuman Wrongs.” 19. Williams, “Massa Day Done,” in Forged from the Love of Liberty, 214–15. 20. “Two-Hour General Strike Threat.” See also “The Bus Strike: Cause for Alarm.” 21. Teelucksingh, “Black Massa or Liberator,” 9. 22. Teelucksingh, “Black Massa or Liberator,” 10. 23. James, “The Union and the Country.” 24. “The Doctor Said: Intimidating Trade Unions,” Vanguard, April 15, 1966. 25. Ibid. 26. “The Doctor Said,” Vanguard, September 3, 1965. 27. Primus, “A Political and Economic Analysis.” For more on Williams’s intellectual contributions, see Palmer, “Eric Williams and His Intellectual Legacy,” 37–47. 28. “Dr. Williams on Butler.” 29. Ramsahai, “Looking Back.” 30. “1965 Idiots.” 31. Palmer, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, 289. 32. Williams, Inward Hunger (Deutsch edition), 311. 33. “Weekes Sheds Blood.” See also “Williams Threatens to Lock Up Political Opponents.” 34. Ryan, “Eric Williams and Party Politics,” 77. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. See also Hackett, “Cabinet Orders Gas and Sugar.” 37. Ryan, “Eric Williams and Party Politics,” 77. 38. Selwyn, “Discussion with the Author [ Jerome Teelucksingh],” April 27, 2001. 39. Ryan, “Eric Williams and Party Politics,” 70. 40. Williams, “The P.N.M. Restates Its Fundamental Principles.” 41. “The Doctor Said: Trade Unions and Politics,” Vanguard, January 21, 1966. 42. “George Weekes, Trade Unions, and Politics.” 43. Williams, address to a mass meeting at Couva Recreation Ground. 44. Ibid. 45. “Cabinet Stops Further Retrenchment in Oil.” 46. Partap, “C. L. R. James: Williams Was No Genius.” 47. “Panday Sees ‘Starvation’ in New Move.” 48. Ibid. 49. “1969 Is Agriculture Year.” 50. Mahabir, “Enhanced Role for Labour.” 51. Williams, “Address at the Seminar on Effective Management.” For more on Williams’s contribution to the economy, see Boodhoo, “Economic Thoughts and Economic Policy,” 51–63. 52. Williams, “Her Name Is Woman.” 53. Williams, “Address to Harmon High School.” 54. Williams, “Address to Second Biennial Conference of the SWWTU.”

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55. Williams, “Address to the Meeting of the Southern Branch of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce.” 56. Panday, “The Grand Deception.” 57. Carr, “Govt. $ Urged for Labour.” 58. Ryan, “The Limits of Executive Power,” 78. 59. Mohammed, “A Very Public Private Man,” 180.

chapter 7

eric WiLLiams and PuBLic service reform roLand g. BaPTisTe

When Eric Williams’s People’s National Movement (PNM) came to power in Trinidad and Tobago in 1956, its stated objective for the Public Service was twofold:1 (1) put an end to favoritism, discrimination, and political interference in appointments, transfers, and promotions; and (2) guarantee the appointment of qualified West Indians to the highest positions.2 These objectives were derived logically from the PNM’s overall goal of bringing the injustices of colonialism to an end.3 Favoritism and discrimination were burning issues for Williams and his generation. In his autobiography Inward Hunger, Williams recounts the story of a young civil servant of 1911 who was denied the promotion he deserved and expected because, in the opinion of the head of his department, he lacked “social qualifications.”4 Williams noted that this “lack” was an impediment to the progress of thousands of Trinidadians, inside and outside the civil service, and pointed out that his father was one of them—the necessary social qualifications were color, money, and education, in that order. However, the Public Service did not allow the PNM government to restrict itself to its narrow objectives. Instead it presented its own list of problems to the new administration. Hence, from the outset, on the issue of public service reform, the PNM government was reactive rather than proactive. Upon coming into office, Williams’s Executive Council (the colony’s equivalent of a cabinet) accepted a number of recommendations to improve the functioning of various departments. Resolved to deal with the whole rather than each part separately, the council appointed minister Ulric Lee as chairman of a committee to advise the government on the reorganization of the Public Service. Lee’s 1959 report had two significant parts. The first concerned a recommendation for the establishment of independent service commissions for each Public Service branch, and the second addressed the reclassification of 149

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posts together with the drawing of new organizational charts for all ministries and departments. Under the Crown Colony system, the Public Service was an advisory body to the governor and simply made recommendations on its recruitment, promotions, and terminations, with the governor having final say. To deal with the issue of discrimination, the Lee report recommended that the status of the commission should become an executive body, protected by law from political and governmental interference. The Executive Council implemented this recommendation, thereby constructing the first pillars of the postcolonial Public Service in Trinidad. It was expected that this device would minimize nepotism and favoritism. The Executive Council also accepted and implemented Lee’s recommendations on reclassification, thus enabling the PNM to say it had achieved the following promises contained in its 1961 Election Manifesto: (1) The establishment of three executive service commissions (the Public Service, the Police Force, and the Judiciary); (2) the reorganization and reclassification of the Public Service; (3) the increasing West Indianization of the Service; and, (4) the extension of pensions and gratuity.5 1962–1973: The PuBLic service in The age of indePendence

During their second term in office, Williams and his government again found themselves in a reactive rather than a proactive situation with respect to the service. The specific problem was job classification. In a public address in 1965, Williams explained that, after conducting two regrading exercises, it became clear that “what we had to try to deal with was the entire Public Service of Trinidad and Tobago and that what principally was wrong was that the Service, the Public Service, was not properly classified.”6 A firm from the United States had been brought in to address the issue, but its work was not considered satisfactory. The Trinidadian government then decided to establish a number of “joint working parties” consisting of senior civil servants and representatives of public service unions and associations to consider the role of the different services in the age of independence. The reports from these working parties were submitted toward the end of 1964 and into 1965. Williams found them valuable but limited. He concluded that the government’s intentions may not have been fully understood.

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To Williams’s disappointment, the working parties concentrated on pay and did not address the classification of jobs and other aspects of institutional strengthening. Williams decided to do what he considered necessary and appointed a cabinet committee, with himself as the chair, whose objective was the integration of the various services (i.e., civil, police, fire, and education) into a single administrative entity with respect to its classification and compensation. The committee discovered that it had to undertake a comprehensive restructuring of the Public Service, and Williams brought this to the attention of the PNM at its Ninth Annual Convention in 1965: Our third priority relates to our public service—civil servants, policemen, fire officers, teachers, employees of statutory boards. This is not only a question of wages; it is even more a question of classification and qualifications and the remuneration that should go with both, a question of bargaining and negotiating machinery and procedures for the resolution of disputes. This is a comprehensive exercise which, after examination by Working Parties appointed for the purpose, has been receiving the unremitting attention of the Cabinet for the past nine months. It involves a revaluation and reappraisal of all the disorganization, prejudices, special privileges, and discrimination inherited from the colonial regime—the underestimation of professional and technical qualifications, the stagnation at certain levels such as subordinate police officers, the discrimination against primary school teacher[s], the hotch potch of posts, and the jumble of salary scales imposed one upon the other on an ad hoc basis as the scope of governmental activity has increased, the hopeless confusion of the education legislation of the colonial period.7 The cabinet eventually produced sweeping proposals for change and put these into legislation. The principal features of the legislation were the following: 1. Establish in law the civil service. 2. Establish a personnel department to negotiate and bargain with associations of employees. 3. Keep the classification and compensation plans under review. 4. Establish conditions for the recognition of representative associations.

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5. Establish machinery within the Industrial Court to deal with disputes. 6. Establish terms and conditions of employment.8 These features formed the basis of the “Service Acts” by which they became known. The Civil Service Act became the model for acts governing the police, fire, and prison services, and for the part of the Education Act that established the terms and conditions of teacher employment. Thus the second set of pillars of the post-colonial Public Service had been constructed. Simultaneously a classification and compensation plan was decided on, and a commission to govern the statutory boards was erected. It should be pointed out that while the personnel management system received considerable attention, the critical importance of financial management, certain constitutional provisions, and other pieces of legislation made the Divisions of the Ministry of Finance the third set of pillars. Accordingly, by 1966, the end of the PNM’s second term in office, the key structural features of the post-colonial Public Service, with its three focal organizations (the Service Commissions Department, the Personnel Department, and the Ministry of Finance), was firmly in place. The overall effect was the construction of the legalistic, centralized bureaucracy that has remained essentially the same since that time. These features were not original because the same mechanisms, with variations here and there, had been adopted in other British Caribbean territories and in other parts of the Commonwealth. Indeed, they reflected the prevailing paradigm of public administration, and insofar as Trinidad and Tobago and other English-speaking Caribbean states had established legal public services, they were considered more advanced than many of their Latin American neighbors. This having been accomplished, Williams and his government may well have thought that the matter of public service reform could be put to rest. But it did not go away. As early as 1964, a faint signal of an emerging problem seemed to go unnoticed: one of the joint working party reports of 1964 noted a pronounced slowing of the decision-making process in the service after independence.9 That signal had undoubtedly amplified several times by 1969 because the cabinet soon found itself having to investigate the service as the dysfunctions typically associated with the traditional bureaucratic form of organization (such as red tape and goal displacement) manifested themselves with full force.

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To deal with this new situation, Williams commissioned a working group, which had two major objectives: to make recommendations for improving and expediting the functioning of the machinery of the government of Trinidad and Tobago, and to analyze the reviewing process of the same. Specific areas for investigation were identified. In keeping with the cabinet’s concern for speeding up the machinery of government, the working group was asked to examine laws and regulations and to consider streamlining procedures relating to personnel management, accounting, internal office organization, communications, and coordination within and between ministries; relations with the public; and decision making. The request that the laws be examined was an admission that, while the problems of inequity and discrimination may have been addressed in legislation, those very reforms had generated new problems. The cabinet obviously believed that ways and means could be found by qualified investigators to improve the system; thus the appointment of the working group. In the same vein, this committee never questioned the basic assumptions and theories that governed the structure of the Public Service, and may be accused of only treating the symptoms. The committee’s 1970 report, known colloquially as the “Dolly Report” but officially titled “The Report of the Working Group on the Organization and Streamlining of Public Service Practice and Procedures in Trinidad and Tobago,” with its eighty-five recommendations and several subreferences, turned out to be just another operations manual for the existing system. Therefore it must be read in conjunction with the Service Acts and the constitutional provisions governing the Public Service. Subsequent events showed that these recommendations had little effect on performance. Unfortunately, at this time Williams showed little enthusiasm for public service reform, because of either disillusionment or weariness or both. In the circumstances of the 1970s, it can be argued that establishing appropriate organizations was a fundamental requirement, that his intervention was as necessary then as it had been in the 1960s, and that finding the appropriate organizational vehicle would have required examining and questioning the prevailing public administration paradigm. It seemed as if no one with the necessary authority was thinking in those terms at the time.

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1973–1981: The oiL Boom, disiLLusionmenT, and decLine

Nineteen seventy-three was a memorable year. It was the year the oil boom began, a “revolution,” as Williams called it in his 1976 budget address. Huge sums of oil dollars flowed into the government’s hands in a steady stream. It was also fortuitous that the boom occurred shortly after Williams announced a dramatic change in policy direction in the wake of the Black Power revolt of 1970. In a 1970 revision of the People’s Charter, the PNM announced its goal of reconstruction. The document explained that the task of reconstruction must allow the West Indian masses to acquire economic as well as political power, to make their own culture, and to participate fully in both the political and the economic process. It also specifically pointed out that the guiding ideology for this process was to be neither liberal capitalism nor Marxism. Achieving those objectives, as the PNM then saw it, required the end of foreign domination of the economy and the taking of the “commanding heights of the economy” by the state. It therefore decided on the following options: (1) The assumption by the State of outright ownership (with compensation) of certain foreign-controlled enterprises; (2) fifty-one percent participation by the State in other foreign firms; (3) joint ventures on a 50-50 basis with foreign firms where appropriate; and, (4) government regulation over particular enterprises as necessary. In taking this policy direction, the PNM envisioned that the public sector would be the main driver of economic development: In any programme for reconstruction the economic role of the State must go beyond the provision of economic and social infrastructure. It must engage in productive activities and generally as an entrepreneur.10 The government was now, in effect, asking a public service, already considerably slowed by red tape, to behave in an entrepreneurial manner. The problems of red tape and ponderous decision making that had started in the 1960s worsened with the rapid growth of the Public Service in the decade to follow. A 1978 Personnel Department report shows that the service grew from 37,000 salaried employees in 1973 to just short of 50,000 that year.

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The conservative prediction was that it would grow to just short of 62,000 by 1983.11 Could this institution deliver what was asked of it? The problems of the Public Service took a peculiar twist in 1975 as Williams’s relations with some of the most senior public servants turned sour. After the matter publicly exploded, fear and timidity among public servants compounded the general lethargy. Indeed, the Dumas Committee, organized by Williams’s successor George Chambers to make service reform recommendations, found fear to be a significant issue even nine years later.12 Who was on the right side of this conflict is irrelevant for the purposes of the discussion at hand, but what the conflict signaled is of great interest and importance. Williams told his side of the story at the PNM’s 1975 Annual Convention. He accused a several top public servants of making major deals with foreign governments without cabinet approval. He concluded: I wonder how many of you here understand how close we stood in Trinidad and Tobago to takeover by a technocracy, only wanting someone to convey an aura of respectability by chairing its committee.13 While he was careful to say that this was a threat from a minority, his statements created an atmosphere of trepidation among most senior officers. Even as this gloom engulfed an already leaden service, the government continued to expect it to be entrepreneurial. Not surprisingly, Williams’s frustration grew with the passage of time, and this is clearly evident in his budget speeches during the second half of the 1970s. In such a speech of 1977, Williams described the difficulties the service was experiencing in developing and implementing projects. The problems identified were weaknesses in organizational structure, staffing of sectoral agencies, procedural arrangements (including those necessary to ensure effective coordination both within and between executing agencies), and relevant training and experience. He explained: Over the last three years especially, there has been a marked increase in the volume, size, complexity, and cost of the capital works being undertaken by the public sector. The pace of these developments has not been matched by the pace of the restructuring of the Public Service, improvements in staffing in a qualitative sense, and rationalization of the use of existing staff. As a result, the public sector of the economy has found itself increasingly unable to cope with the managerial and

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other requirements for effective implementation of the capital works which it has undertaken or proposes to undertake.14 One is tempted to suggest that the Williams of 1962 would have striven to uncover causes and locate solutions. On this occasion, his government decided to establish planning and development units in ministries, staff them with the full range of expertise, rationalize the use of existing staff, grant them more autonomy, and provide appropriate training with the assistance of the Organization of American States. Though this was a step in the right direction, it was not enough. The question to answer was whether these planning units could function effectively while located in highly bureaucratic ministries. But this question was not asked, nor was the problem solved, as Williams’s subsequent actions and attitude indicated. In the following year’s budget address, the only comment Williams made about the service was contained in a dismissive paragraph: Frequent proposals have been made in respect of the further expansion and development of administrative training for Trinidad and Tobago’s public servants. The latest call is from the National Advisory Council for the establishment of an Administrative Staff College.15 There was no further comment. By the end of 1978, it became clear that Williams had lost all confidence in his civil service. In his 1979 budget address, he explained that he would implement three strategies to get things done: government-to-government contracts, the use of local consortia of private firms, and the involvement of state enterprises. “All are measures which, to some extent, will provide some direct relief to the Ministries and other agencies.”16 The main implementation vehicle was to be the government-to-government contract, that is, contracts between the government of Trinidad and Tobago and those of foreign countries; construction, road building, drainage, and water and sewerage were among the things to be accomplished by these contracts. This was privatization and outsourcing ten years before they became management fads, but it was privatization and outsourcing without downsizing, at once wasteful and self-defeating. Williams’s problems continued to grow. In his budget address of 1980, he expressed concern about increasing government expenditures and warned that they could not continue indefinitely. In particular he reported that the number of Public Service posts had grown by 40 percent in the five years

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from 1973 to 1978, and between 1974 and 1979 personnel emoluments had increased from $299.7 million to $2,873 million.17 It was unclear whether he blaming anyone else for the problem or proposing to address the issue in the near future; he did not extrapolate, nor did the budget include what rectifying measures would be taken.18 Nor was anything said in the following year. Williams did, however, issue certain ominous warnings. He informed the nation that the idea of Trinidad as a welfare state was being seriously questioned internationally, and then complained bitterly about the huge cost overruns in almost every governmental project in the country. Three months later, Williams died. concLusion

In Selwyn Ryan’s assessment of the achievements and failures of Williams’s tenure, public service reform is counted as a failure.19 Another researcher analyzed numerous Public Service reports written between 1964 and 1984 and concluded that although they all made similar recommendations over the years, none was ever implemented.20 Still, it is possible to assess Williams’s reform efforts from another, more sympathetic angle. It cannot be denied that in the 1960s Williams worked to build an effective Public Service. The problem was not one of effort; it was one of paradigm. Owen Hughes summarizes the key principles of this paradigm. The first is that governments should organize themselves according to the hierarchical principles enunciated in the classic analysis of bureaucracy by Max Weber. Hughes notes that although adopted by business and other institutions, these precepts are carried out far more diligently and for a longer period in the public sector. The assumption is that strict adherence to these principles provides the single best way of operating an organization. The second principle is that once government involves itself in an area, it should then become the direct provider of goods and services through the bureaucracy. Third, political and administrative matters should be separated; fourth, public administration is considered a special form of administration and therefore requires a professional bureaucracy, employed for life, with the ability to serve any political master equally.21 Hughes notes that all these principles have been challenged since. Perhaps the most discredited of the four principles is Weber’s hierarchical prescriptions, but in the public service of Williams’s time, no one questioned them.

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They served as a priori assumptions, and therein lay the service’s tragedy. Moreover, it can be argued that bureaucracy—even with its inherent dysfunctions—works better in some cultures than in others, and Trinidad and Tobago’s culture was not conducive to fostering a successful bureaucracy. It was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that these assumptions were widely exposed and alternatives were sought. Today a new set of assumptions, called the “New Public Management,” has gained ground, advocating the use of private sector managerial approaches to running public service organizations, including such measures as pay-for-performance, outsourcing, and privatization. New Public Management has become the new paradigm in Trinidad and Tobago. As this new approach is embraced, some reflection on the experiences of Williams and his generation might be useful. They had assimilated the collective wisdom of their time and seemed never to have questioned it. Those who today accept a new collective wisdom should learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. noTes 1. The Public Service Association changed its name from the Civil Services Association in 1971 during Eric Williams’s tenure as prime minister. This chapter refers to the organization as the “Public Service” or “the service.” 2. “The People’s National Movement: General Elections Manifesto.” 3. “The People’s Charter: A Statement of Fundamental Rights.” 4. Williams, Inward Hunger (Deutsch edition, 1969), 26. 5. “General Elections Manifesto.” 6. Williams, “Reorganization of the Public Service.” 7. Williams, “Address Delivered by the Right Honourable Eric Williams,” Ninth Annual PNM Convention, transcript dated September 24, 1965. 8. “Civil Service Act, Chapter 23.01, Laws of Trinidad and Tobago.” 9. “Report of the Working Group.” 10. “People’s Charter Revised, 1970.” 11. “The Growth of the Public Service 1973–1978 and Projected Growth 1979–1983.” 12. Draper, “Quest for Appropriate Public Service Reform.” 13. Sutton, Forged from the Love of Liberty, 191. 14. Williams, “Budget Speech,” December 10, 1976. 15. Williams, “Budget Speech,” December 2, 1977. 16. Williams, “Budget Speech,” December 1, 1978. 17. The word billion was not in common usage in Trinidad and Tobago at the time Dr. Williams delivered this budget speech; he would have read it aloud as “two thousand eight

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hundred and seventy-three million.” Also, in writing the number, a comma rather than a period should be used; thus $2,873 million is the correct expression, written and spoken, in this context. 18. Williams, “Budget Speech,” November 30, 1980. 19. Draper, “Quest for Appropriate Public Service Reform.” 20. Ibid. 21. Hughes, Public Management and Administration, 1.

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Part iii

TexTuaL WiLLiams

8.1 On June 2, 1967, the United States handed over Chaguaramas to Trinidad and Tobago. Photograph courtesy of the Ministry of Communications, Trinidad and Tobago.

chapter 8

Inward Hunger how eric Williams fails Postcolonial history granT farred

did the land of Toussaint Louverture pose yet another question—that West indian colonials were destined to graduate from european colonialism to american? —eric Williams, Inward Hunger

In the history of the anti- and postcolonial Caribbean, the event of Chaguaramas marks the instance of triple failure. It is an example of federalist dreams destroyed; of a protonationalist sovereignty negotiated, mediated, bargained, and compromised; and of a postcolonial history unaccounted for and silenced, especially, in the case of Eric Williams, through the genre of autobiography. Chaguaramas may not quite be the rock on which Anglophone Caribbean unification floundered—though it is certainly tempting to read the naval base as a political shipwreck of federal ambitions—but it does offer itself as the metaphoric locale where Trinidadian independence confronted the complications of the postcolonial condition. When Chaguaramas was nominated as the capital of the West Indian Federation, the US authorities refused to cede the northwest area around the Chaguaramas military base, land they had obtained from imperial Britain in 1941 on a ninety-nine-year lease. “On September 2, 1940,” Williams writes in his autobiography Inward Hunger, “the American and British governments reached an agreement by which, in return for fifty over-age American destroyers, the British Government ceded bases in the Western Hemisphere to the United States, free of charge, for 99 years.” After much interisland disagreement about the status of the various larger and smaller islands and the sense that Trinidadians and Jamaicans were exercising their dominance based on their size, the inability to secure Chaguaramas as the administrative capital signaled a symbolic death knell to the hopes 163

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for a West Indian federation. Jamaica’s withdrawal from the potential federation prompted Williams’s famous arithmetical analogy “one from ten leaves naught.” Any hope for a unified Anglophone Caribbean died ignominiously with little prospect of resuscitation. However, the loss of Chaguaramas also had nationalist and historiographical implications for both Eric Williams and his country. The standoff among Great Britain, the United States, and the Trinbagonian government marks a key turning point in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. As evidenced in Inward Hunger, the complex events around Chaguaramas identify the shift from trenchant anticolonialism to historic accommodationism with US neoimperialism, and from ending British rule to shaking hands on a compact with Yankee expansionism. This essay offers a reading of Chaguaramas as an instance of historical nonaccounting, of the failure of Williams the historian to explain and critique the consequences of his actions as Williams the statesman in his autobiography. After all, he was the author of Capitalism and Slavery, a text read by contemporary historians as one of the founding documents of “dependency theory” and a “moral critique of capitalism” and slavery.1 As a general discourse, autobiography ipso facto is a self-selective, selfcensoring genre, a mode that allows for silencing embarrassments and the favorable representing of the historical self. But it is also a literary form eminently capable of undoing its own subjectivity, so that we might understand the autobiography as an autoimmune text, a narrative that contains within itself the seeds of its own deconstruction or, worse, destruction. Inward Hunger is, in this regard, demonstrative of the genre insofar as Williams’s account of events is at once insistently interrogative while also elucidating the inconsistencies, aporias, and failures of personalizing anti- and postcolonial history. Williams produces disjunctive discourses around Chaguaramas in Inward Hunger. There is a sharp contrast between ways in which the narrative of struggle and sovereignty over the military base is cast in its pre- and post-1961 instantiations. The anticolonial campaign, full of strident anti-imperialism, is irreconcilable with the postcolonial Trinidadian nation-state, in which Chaguaramas becomes a symbol of New World and Third World cooperation with US imperialism, an event that offers an abbreviated, insufficiently accounted-for explanation of postcolonial accommodation. Inward Hunger demonstrates how the nationalist autobiography—the construction of the heroic male self as metonymic of the nation’s coming into independence—functions as an overburdened, ideologically inconsistent

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text. Inward Hunger is the personal narrative that is the nationalist narrative, assuming the status of communal document, the tale of individual accomplishment that only strategically countenances historical interrogation; the story of the historian’s life that abbreviates (and attempts to forestall) historical critique; the narrative in which the anti-imperialist campaigner bears no resemblance to the postcolonial leader; the movement from resistance to immersion in the state to becoming the state. Inward Hunger represents not only the generic limitations of the autobiography but also the ways in which historical events can be over- and underrepresented within the tale of the individual life. Through the onset of the People’s National Movement’s campaign against the continued postindependence US occupation of the Chaguaramas military base, Williams argued not only for the recognition of an impending Trinbagonian sovereignty but for both a new and a retrospective historical agency conferred by independence. The status of Trinidadians was changing, Inward Hunger insists, so the very terms of the agreement should have been, at worst, reviewed or, at best, revoked: “The people of Trinidad and Tobago were not consulted in the surrender of their land in return for fifty destroyers, their views ignored with respect to the particular areas to be ceded.”2 While grounding his critiques in 1950s conjuncture, what Williams is really militating against is that earlier moment, that is, colonialism and the consequences for the Caribbean of that historic disenfranchisement. There is a political ingenuity in the representation of the events of 1941 to 1961 on which Williams’s entire argument turns. It is not simply that the “people of Trinidad and Tobago were not consulted”; it is that colonialism did not require consultation with the island’s populace about their property and the use of their resources. Williams is strategically claiming an a priori agency (which we must always, following Michel Foucault, understand structurally), an enfranchisement that antedates events. He makes no temporal distinction between the era of colonialism (which marks a rapidly receding past), the present campaign against US occupation, and future postcolonial sovereignty. The lack of prior agency, the subjugated status that is colonialism, is implicitly condemned because of its contemporary effects for a soon-to-be-independent people, that is, the sovereignty that postcolonial status inscribes and confers on the previously colonized. In Williams’s autobiography, “the past”—that fertile site of historical action—is cast as continuous with and continuously affecting the present and the future. Williams implicitly writes black Trinbagonian agency back into and against the history of colonialism: the people

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of Trinidad and Tobago should have been consulted, and ergo, their sovereignty metaphorically predates actual independence. Inward Hunger’s implication is clear. Because Trinbagonians were not consulted, the earlier agreement is of questionable validity now. The colonial past is simultaneously indicted and overwritten, recalled, and reinscribed; Trinidadians’ disenfranchisements are simultaneously historicized and dehistoricized. In Williams’s more poetic, historically laden, and catchy phrasing, “We did not consent to be sold for scrap.”3 This statement again emphasizes the absence of historical choice and refutes the abject status that colonialism assigns the subjugated Caribbean nation-in-formation. More provocatively, it also poses the question of history: when does the subject of colonialism own the land of his or her birth? Ever? Agency, the right to historical and personal self-determination so central to the production of the autonomous autobiographical subject, is produced here as the insistent Trinbagonian political consciousness. Trinidad’s and Williams’s right to self-determination is retroactive. It is the metaphysical and ideological “hunger” that motivates the subject; independence is the satiation of that hunger, the “inward” and external fulfillment and expression of the individual and collective selves. Sovereignty is what converts inward desire— that which is born within, inarticulable because of colonialism, repressed and thwarted by colonialism—into the outward manifestation of independence. Chaguaramas reveals the contradiction of that desire. Spoken on the eve of independence, Williams’s “sold for scrap” phrasing astutely inverts the condition of colonialism. Paradoxically, it is British imperialism that is about to be consigned to the scrap heap of history by those once considered colonialism’s detritus; colonial Trinidad’s challenge to the British-US deal marks the return of the previously scrapped, the Fanonian damnés de la terre (the “wretched of the earth”), as the dealers of a new, agential history.4 From Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya to Inward Hunger, combative discourse is typical of anticolonialist, protonationalist discourse. However, what is salient about Williams’s autobiography is how Chaguaramas as a historical complex, a cluster of events, a series of anti-imperial struggles, is too easily dissolved as a rhetorical shift. In a triumphalist text, the confrontation over Chaguaramas is quantitatively—not ideologically—resolved: “The United States agreed to abandon some 21,000 acres of the land leased under the 1940 Agreement, including unused portions of the Naval Station at Chaguaramas and all areas outside of the north-west peninsula.”5 Williams becomes, through the change in his position, the negative materialization of his own prescience.

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In the terms of the book Black Jacobins, written by Williams’s Queens Royal College teacher and later political interlocutor (to phrase that fraught relationship most neutrally) C. L. R. James, Williams becomes the anti-Toussaintian graduate. James is, of course, a spectral presence in Inward Hunger; how could it be otherwise, given Williams’s invocation of Toussaint and, no less crucial, the ideologically riven nature of their relationship? It is because of James that the Saint-Domingue specter of Toussaint hangs so forebodingly over Williams’s political consciousness, raising the following questions: Did Williams fear that he would, like Toussaint, make too many accommodations with (neo)imperialist modernity? Did he fear that the events of Chaguaramas would destine him to postcolonial irrelevance or worse? Did he fear a harsh judgment from the ethical court of postcolonial history? Did he imagine Chaguaramas as an ethical failure? Did he fear that this would be the first capitulation to the very forces of capital he had so stringently opposed in his work as a historian? Chaguaramas must have raised for Williams the (unspeakable) specter of himself as the anticolonial subject who has, by his own measure, failed in his allegiance to the cause of Caribbean sovereignty. At this conjuncture in Inward Hunger (which we might now properly name a “haunted” text, an “auto-biography,” an account of the self that is troubled by other forces of history, other persons, and signal events in which ghostly presences lurk, disturbing the narrative), Williams is transfigured in and because of the autobiography. Through his own acts as chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago, he becomes the British colonial, the Fanonian national bourgeoisie, the comprador par excellence who swaps European imperialism for American neoimperialism. Or, more precisely, the incipient national leader who trades his earlier narrative of Trinbagonian inviolability for “21,000 acres of land.” Williams becomes, in this moment and through this act, the figure of betrayal that will not account for its compromise of postcolonial sovereignty, an experience all too symptomatic of postcolonial elites. To this list we might add Williams’s historical contemporaries: Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sékou Touré, and, for too long now, Robert Mugabe. And, yes, Nelson Mandela; and we might certainly pencil in Jacob Zuma. The condition of Trinbagonian sovereignty reveals the incommensurability between the rhetoric of Williams’s anticolonialism and the new nation-state’s first engagement with the limitations of nascent postcolonial sovereignty. After an extended campaign to annul the US/British land lease agreement of 1940, as chief minister, Williams announced: “February 10 [1961] was a historic day for Trinidad and Tobago. In an impressive and

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deeply-moving ceremony the Trinidad and Tobago flag, together with the West Indian flag, went up side by side with the American at Chaguaramas.”6 It could be argued that, at the least, sovereignty attained was sovereignty halved, inherently demanding: what are the limits of sovereignty? Or, differently phrased, what value is Caribbean sovereignty in a Cold War world? But these are not questions that unduly troubled the author of Inward Hunger. Implicit in Williams’s account of events is the fatally misplaced supposition of symbolic egalitarianism: Trinidad and Tobago and the United States are equal partners. The renegotiated agreement with the United States is read as “taking the form of assistance in the defense of [the] Trinidad and Tobago way of life in return for the contribution that Chaguaramas made to the defense of the American way of life.”7 Williams does not reflect on the disjunctures, disparities, and inequities between the US and the Trinbagonian ways of life. It is not that the differences do not register; it is that Williams’s new position—of accommodation with neoimperialism, with this new capital, with his transformation into a “dependent”—cannot find a public voice. If it did, his rhetoric would be undermined by the history of his own discourse; the critique of neoimperialist accommodationism must remain “inward bound,” as it were: unspeakable and therefore unspoken and, in turn, always rhetorically in play—ever on the tip of the nation’s political tongue, always being asked even as it is never asked. Williams’s configuring of the Chaguaramas incident, in addition to the tendency for anticolonial realpolitik and the accommodation of the imperial or neoimperial power, demonstrates the autobiography’s blindness to its subject’s own implication in its own culpability. At issue here is not that the personal is always political but that the personal obscures and undermines the historical. Moreover, the personal narrative is always inadequate as a document of—or for—the history of the nation. The national narrative has a hunger no autobiography can satisfy. To illustrate this point in a more recent context, almost comic in its grandiosity, we have the ludicrous example of Saparmurat Niyazov: “Turkmenbashi,” the “father” of all Turkmen and all of Turkmenistan. Before his death in 2006, Turkmenbashi believed himself capable of, among other things, providing the answers to every possible inquiry about his nation in his “memoir” Ruhnama.8 Williams, of course, possessed none of Niyazov’s megalomania; however, his belief that he was “writing the nation” reveals a peculiar insight into the thinking of many postcolonial leaders. Finally, “the nation” always deserves and demands more than one single narrative. Out of historical

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necessity, every national narrative must be capable of arguing with itself before—or, at least, at the same time as—it can argue for itself. In contrast, the autobiography is loyal only to its subject, not to the discipline of history; interrogating and probing that nexus of accountability and agency as a complex of possibility and limitation are not actions an autobiographical subject willingly engages in. In Inward Hunger, Williams is unable to recognize, as Marx does in The Eighteenth Brumaire, that human subjects only rarely make history under conditions of their own choosing. All action is invariably contingent; it is for this reason that Williams’s post-1961 deal cannot bear the scrutiny of his pre-1961 pronouncements. The issue at stake here is not so much discursive incommensurability; rather, it is the historian’s refusal to articulate how the pressures of neoimperial history influence a postcolonial nation’s narrative of itself because the autobiography does not allow it. The national leader’s autobiography functions as a nationalist écriture: the symbolic writing of the nation, the overidentification of the autobiographical self with the nation as a whole, the preservation of personal stature over historical accountability, the refusal to explain how and why the ideology that sustained the anticolonial is dissipated in and by neocolonial accommodationism. In Inward Hunger, Williams the historian functions not only metonymically but also prophylactically; Williams the author of the personal history is dedicated to insulating and protecting Williams the postcolonial leader from critique about historical failure and the effects of ceding to neoimperialism. In the nationalist autobiography, the wider unanticipated workings of history have to be underinterrogated. In Inward Hunger, Facing Mount Kenya, or Ruhnama, the author of the state cannot, must not, be allowed to write the book on the state, the nation, or the nation’s founding. Kenyatta, of course, had the dubious historical advantage of containing within his name the name of the nation; it is appropriate, then, as his son presently assumes power, that Kenyans hold a great deal of skepticism about his name. The name of the nation (Kenyatta) should not be indistinguishable from the name of the Nation (Kenya). Because of this, the historian of Capitalism and Slavery will not investigate, explain, or account for why the pre-1961 guarantee that “nobody is going to play fast and loose with Trinidad’s property, with Trinidad’s resources, with Trinidad’s soil, except with the consent of Trinidad’s Ministers”9 finds himself satisfied with the “improvement to the road to Chaguaramas, the port, the railway, and a college of arts and sciences at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies.”10 Inward Hunger is motivated by a

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grand narrative in which the construction of the heroic protagonist exacts a considerable price. Unacknowledged silences punctuate the autobiography, and along with ideological incommensurabilities, they draw inordinate attention to themselves. Paradoxically, however, what the autobiography reveals most tellingly is Williams’s post-1961 aversion to history, evidenced through his own accomplishments. Ironically, precisely because he reads the anticolonial past so incisively, his unwillingness to critically engage the present—and its future consequences—enunciates itself as a salient historical lack. Williams’s greatest strength, his capacity to read world events past and present, also reveals his weakness. The historian is anesthetized because of his own unspeakable culpability in neocolonialism. Postcolonial history, the making of the future in and through the present, is abandoned to silence by Inward Hunger. In the post-1961 moment, the question posed by Toussaint—were “West Indian colonials destined to graduate from European colonialism to American?”—proves not unanswerable but all too answerable. More to the point, it is the question that Williams never addresses, one that he simply cannot address: answering might undo him, undo the entire rhetorical premise of Inward Hunger. It is the question that makes him confront the realities of his own implication in the neocolonialization of Trinidad and Tobago. That is why Toussaint’s is the question that haunts not only Inward Hunger but Eric Williams’s entire political legacy, the history of the historian. It is, as has been suggested, no coincidence that Toussaint’s query strikingly animates the event of Chaguaramas. Toussaint, the slave who became the head of state, was again reduced to the status of slave as a prisoner-without-rights, one who withered away in a French prison cell. Did Williams’s anti-imperialist commitments lose their ferocity when he agreed to cooperate with the Americans? Whatever question Toussaint poses is less his own than it is James’s. We cannot forget—and Williams most certainly could not have overlooked— that The Black Jacobins was the text that brought Toussaint “back” into Caribbean history. Furthermore, Chaguaramas was one of the principal reasons—the reason, some would argue—that James broke with Williams. Inward Hunger is, in this way, not only a text burdened with political and ideological failings (even as it was being written) but also an instance of the autobiography haunted by a personal, Hamlet-like tragedy. Mediated through Toussaint, Inward Hunger is certainly a case of the political being deeply and painfully personal.

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For this reason, it matters less that the illiterate slave might have replied to Williams’s, the Oxford PhD’s, inquiry in only one way: affirmatively. It matters more that Williams the historian failed the discipline to which he contributed so much, and at such a crucial moment, when the future demanded more than a glossing over of the present, to say nothing of how Williams the statesman failed the sovereign nation—indeed, threw the very notion of Trinbagonian sovereignty, if not her independence (rendered here as the trappings of statehood), into question. The evacuation of sovereignty (i.e., that the French would be replaced by another European colonial power), precarious as it was for the young Haitian nation, was not only Toussaint’s well-founded (and perhaps greatest) fear but his metaphorical charge to his (as yet unimagined) successors: make it impossible for the graduation from one mode of Caribbean subjugation to another—be it a return to slavery or the “temporary” ceding of territorial control—to occur. Historian that he was, Williams did not heed the failures of Toussaint’s Haiti because, we might argue, he was not “hungry” enough; that is, he was not sufficiently aware of how historical tragedy repeats itself, sometimes in the same region, sometimes despite the forewarnings of others. Williams failed to address Toussaint as a fellow Caribbean leader, as well as a sovereign who was, in almost his first act as international leader, operating from the condition of a sovereignty that was not, because of his own actions, in fact, sovereign. noTes 1. Bosch, “Eric Williams and the Moral Rhetoric of Dependency Theory,” 817. 2. Williams, Inward Hunger, 210. 3. Ibid. 4. Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, translated as The Wretched of the Earth, was a stinging critique of how French colonial rule affected the psyche of the Algerian people. First published in 1961 with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Les damnés was controversial because it espoused violence by the lowest classes (i.e., vagrants, peasants, and—one could infer—former slaves) as a rightful means to liberation. 5. Williams, Inward Hunger, 239. 6. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, 241. 7. Ibid., 242. 8. See Paul Theroux’s exquisite article “The Golden Man,” New Yorker, May 28, 2007. 9. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, 215. 10. Ibid., 239.

chapter 9

CapItalIsm and slavery revisiTed remaking the slave commodity frontier daLe Tomich

More than sixty years after its publication, Capitalism and Slavery remains a fundamental contribution to Caribbean history and that of slavery in the Americas. In a frankly materialist attack on idealist interpretations of abolition and emancipation, Eric Williams sought to disclose the economic processes and interests undergirding slavery and abolition in the British West Indies. In its most elemental formulation, Williams’s thesis is that slavery and the slave trade provided the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution in England and that mature capitalism destroyed the slave system.1 What is remarkable is that Williams’s interpretation retains its appeal despite the efforts of subsequent generations of historians to refute it. Beginning in the 1970s, through systematic and rigorous empirical examination of prevailing economic conditions, scholars such as Roger Anstey (The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition [1975]), Seymour Drescher (Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition [1977]), and David Eltis (Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade [1987]) have argued that Britain’s abolition of the slave trade occurred during a period of prosperity for both the West Indies and the slave trade itself. Denying links between interests promoting capitalist development and abolition, these authors have focused instead on the sources of antislavery thought, as well as the effectiveness of abolitionism in mounting a social and political movement against slavery. They argue that the abolitionist campaign, not economic interest, accounts for the demise of this prosperous sector of the imperial economy. Despite a body of scholarship that has contested such interpretations and has continued to explore the economic and political connections between slavery, the slave trade, antislavery, and capitalist development,2 such interpretations have gained wide circulation and too often (uncritical) acceptance, particularly in academic circles. My concern here is that, as a result of these critiques, the rich interpretive possibilities for understanding slavery 172

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9.1 Translations of Williams’s seminal work Capitalism and Slavery, which reframed the historiography of the British transatlantic slave trade and its concomitant European incarnations. A new Turkish translation was published in 2014. Photograph courtesy of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

and antislavery within the broad transformations of the nineteenth-century world economy presented by Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery have fallen by the wayside, as has a more general engagement with the political economy of slavery. The economics of slavery have increasingly become the preoccupation of specialist historians and are seldom regarded as integral to general accounts of slavery and abolition. Dismissal of the economic factor and a restrictive preoccupation with ideology, politics, and social movements have, in some ways, brought us back to the materialist-idealist antimony that informed the debate about slavery and abolition from its inception. This chapter reexamines Williams’s arguments about the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, as well as the critiques they received, from the perspective of Atlantic slavery and the world economy. My point here is not to enter into a substantive discussion of whether slavery was profitable in the era of abolition and emancipation; rather, my purpose is to examine the ways in which the analytical frameworks deployed by Williams and his critics have shaped the terms of the debate. Drawing on historical and theoretical approaches that were not available to him, I argue that because both Williams and his critics confine the discussion of Capitalism and Slavery to Britain and its colonies, the debate is inadequately posited. Williams treats Britain and the British West Indies as stable, self-enclosed, internally integrated analytical units that act on one another as external forces. Similarly,

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other acting units such as the slave formations of Brazil, Cuba, and the United States are present in Williams’s historical account but are construed as discrete entities that influenced events in Britain and the British West Indies from the outside through commodity prices, policies toward slavery, and so on. Such an approach eliminates from consideration the interdependence among such units and the ways in which they are continually formed and reformed through the complex and multifaceted relations between them.3 By examining the issue from a more comprehensive analytical perspective, this chapter argues that it is possible to more effectively recuperate Williams’s emphasis on the economic causes of slave emancipation and reformulate the terms of the debate within the broader historical processes of the Atlantic and world economies. More specifically, I contend that the slave economy of the British West Indies underwent a crisis during the first third of the nineteenth century, but this crisis was not the result of the direct and unilateral relation between British industrialization and the West Indian sugar colonies or because slave labor was in some unilateral sense incompatible with and rendered obsolete by industrial capital. Rather, its roots lie in the broader expansion and transformation of the European world economy during the first half of the nineteenth century. British industrial, commercial, and financial expansion played a crucial role in creating a new world division of labor and a new pattern of market organization. However, the emergence of new and more productive zones of slave commodity production outside the British Empire was of fundamental importance for the restructuring of world production and trade. The unprecedented growth of slave-produced cotton in the United States, sugar in Cuba, and coffee in Brazil altered the conditions of plantation staple production, undercut the position of the British West Indian sugar colonies, and left them unable to compete in world markets. Through the massive redeployment of slave labor, these new plantation zones supplied world markets with tropical staples on a larger scale, for a cheaper price, and of a superior quality than their predecessors. More importantly, they created new commercial circuits and a new world division of labor. Despite the remarkable growth of the Cuban sugar industry during this period, sugar lost its position as the leading commodity in world trade to cotton. The US cotton South became the preponderant supplier of this raw material to the British textile industry, and the United States became the main market for both Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee.4

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a criTique of The deBaTe

I begin by suggesting the ways in which the organization of Williams’s argument in Capitalism and Slavery facilitates its critique. Williams’s project is shaped by his understanding of capitalism. How to define capitalism is an old debate with no particular resolution that is acceptable to all.5 Williams’s conception is not particularly controversial, especially for someone writing in the 1940s; he views capitalism as a national phenomenon that is identified with the development of industry, wage labor, and the free market: “I have not been convinced by anyone that I am not justified in speaking in general terms of Capitalism when the book deals with British Capitalism which was the model and parent of Capitalism elsewhere.”6 Conversely, Williams treats slavery as “a property of the Caribbean,” and he frames the decline of slavery in the British West Indies within a transition in Britain from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism over a period of fifty to sixty years. In his conception, the fate of West Indian slavery is tied to that of monopoly. The West Indian colonies, seen as instruments of mercantilism and monopoly, are represented as a brake on expanding industrial capitalism in Britain that had to be removed.7 The attack on slavery was subsumed within the more general attack on mercantilism and monopoly. The new industrial interests were ready to dismantle the West Indian sugar empire and slave labor in favor of free trade and anti-imperialism. Williams distinguishes three stages in the attack on the West Indian monopoly: (1) the attack on the slave trade (abolished in 1807); (2) the attack on slavery itself (abolished in 1838); and (3) the attack on the colonial sugar preference (abolished in 1846). However, the narrative strategy employed in Capitalism and Slavery reverses the chronological order of these events. Williams begins his account with the abolition of the Corn Laws protecting British agricultural interests from imports of foreign grain (as well as the duties protecting British West Indian sugar from foreign competition) and the establishment of free trade in 1846. He then works in reverse order to treat in succession slave emancipation in the British West Indies during the 1830s and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.8 By structuring the argument in this way, Williams builds a linear progression of events marking the passage from mercantilism to industrial capitalism that presents free trade as virtually the natural and inevitable outcome of industrialization. He construes abolition of the slave trade, slave emancipation, and the declining status of the West Indian colonies within the empire as being a component of the abolition of the Corn Laws, the end of mercantilism, and the emergence of free

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trade. The causal character of each of these antecedent events is determined by construing free trade as the end point of this stage of historical development. Each is treated as if it were a step on the road to the given outcome. Each carries within itself the elements of this transition, and they simultaneously provide the cause and purpose of the transition. The teleological structure of Williams’s presentation contributes to the effectiveness of his critics. Their focus on the abolition of the slave trade— chronologically the first step in the sequence leading to emancipation and free trade—at once reverses the narrative order of Williams’s argument and pulls the linchpin from it. By demonstrating that the abolition of the slave trade did not coincide with economic decline, they at once unravel the causal structure of Williams’s argument and call into question the entire relation between capitalism and slavery as proposed by Williams. The profitability and market efficiency of the West Indian slave economies appear rehabilitated. The sequence of events resulting in abolition and emancipation can no longer be explained by Williams’s account of a transition from mercantilism to industrial capitalism and free trade. Williams’s critics thereby dismiss economic causes altogether and focus instead on moral or political explanations for the abolition of the slave trade and slave emancipation. It is my contention that although Williams’s presentation has made his arguments susceptible to his critics, the criticisms have narrowed and fragmented the terms of the debate in ways that have become unproductive and miss the larger issues he raised. The debate is overly concerned with the profitability or nonprofitability of slavery and the slave trade at the expense of the historical processes making and remaking social relations. It concentrates on the bilateral relation between Britain and its West Indian colonies and treats each as integral and opposed entities. British industrial capitalism appears as the single dynamic source of change acting on the static and unchanging West Indian slave colonies as though it were an external cause. The debate construes trade, prices, ideology, colonial policy, and so on, as the links between these already formed units rather than inquiring into the conditions under which the relations of slavery and colonialism are produced and reproduced in an expanding world economy. The short-term events of abolition and emancipation are emphasized at the expense of the long-term transformations. In other words, Williams’s forest has disappeared in the trees. I argue for a more complex and nuanced view of capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century, with greater attention to the roles of commerce, finance, and power—as well as industry—and to the geographical and

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temporal scope of change. Such a perspective enables us to recover Williams’s concern with the economic crisis of the British West Indies and slave emancipation, and to reinterpret them in a broader framework of the Atlantic and world economies. The pages that follow advance this argument by discussing the example of the development of slave cotton production in the American South. an aLTernaTive vieW: hegemony and caPiTaLism as a WorLd economy

Scholars of capitalism as a world economy offer another way of conceptualizing the relation of capitalism and slavery.9 First, instead of regarding slavery and industrial capital as distinct attributes of different societies, this perspective allows us to treat them as necessarily related parts of the same system. Second, these scholars’ concept of hegemony calls attention to the coincidence and interrelation of finance, commerce, production, and power in the interstate system as the means of securing Britain’s domination and leadership of the nineteenth-century world economy. This emphasis provides a more comprehensive theoretical framework than that of either Williams or his critics. It allows us to examine the autonomous development of each of these spheres of activity (finance, commerce, production, and power in the interstate system) and interrogate their interaction rather than treating them as by-products of industrial production. Further, it enables us to integrate the transnational processes and relations producing and reproducing distinct zones of slave production into a unified historical and theoretical account. Giovanni Arrighi has recently argued that London’s emergence as the center of world finance in the 1780s enabled Britain to organize and govern a new regime of world accumulation.10 The importance of London as the center of world finance lay in the transcendence of barriers to the free flow of goods and money presented by national, state, and interstate competition. US independence, the defeat of France, domination of world shipping, colonial expansion, and the growth of informal empires in Latin America and Asia put Britain at the hub of world trade. Unilateral British liberalization of trade, backed by the virtually unlimited credit available to London’s financial institutions, created the conditions for a boom in world trade and production that accelerated the material—as opposed to financial—expansion of the world economy and resulted in the integration of world markets and reorganization of the world division of labor.

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Consistent with such a perspective, Geoffrey Ingham and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have stressed the importance of London as a world financial and commercial center.11 They argue that Britain’s status as the commercial and financial center of the world system was never simply the extension of its industrial strength. Rather, the policies that constructed British free trade and the sterling-gold standard during the 1820s were intended to enhance trade and banking. Free trade was not the inevitable product of industrial expansion but was intended to strengthen London’s role as a banking and commercial center. As Ingham puts it, the construction of a liberal economic world order was independent of, and frequently opposed to, the views of industrial capital: “In general, the manufacturers had to be persuaded and cajoled into believing that economic liberalism was in their best interests, whereas [London] was, for sound reasons, a more willing convert.”12 The purpose of the early free trade legislation was, in William Huskisson’s words, to make London “the Emporium not only of Europe, but of America, north and south.”13 As a result of the extraordinary internationalization of the British economy from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, stable foreign exchanges became essential to the existence of the British economy.14 Only the gold standard could provide stable foreign exchanges and create conditions for commercial calculability in the market. The creation of the gold standard subordinated Britain’s domestic economy, including industry, to the movement of world markets and its domination of world trade. The convertibility of sterling regulated foreign currencies and provided a stable and acceptable payment mechanism, the liquidity of which was, in part, maintained by the volume and velocity of the trading transactions themselves. These conditions encouraged the maximization of continuous exchange opportunities, and the expansion and regularization of markets. London became the commercial entrepôt for commodities and for the means of exchange and payment for them.15 The expansion of world trade increased its commercial and financial profits. Britain’s position as the undisputed center of world commerce and finance as of 1815 provided the conditions for its industrial development. At the same time, industrialization and the emergence of the superiority of British productive capital enhanced and transformed the scope and character of British finance and commerce and anchored Britain’s role as hegemon in the world economy. The development of the cotton industry beginning in the 1780s gave Britain a competitive advantage in major markets, and cotton exports propelled British economic growth. Nonetheless, Williams’s emphasis on the importance of the potential productivity of British industry

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underestimates the slow and uncertain pace of early industrial development and the economic and social crises of the first half of the nineteenth century, which arguably impeded its progress if not threatened its existence.16 Rather than driving the British economy, the pace of industrialization was slow, and the impact of new productive techniques was concentrated within cotton textile manufacturing. Only in the 1820s was investment in industry greater than that in agriculture. Crisis ridden and uncertain, industrial development was only secured with the advent of the railroad and the industrialization of iron and steel in the 1830s and 1840s.17 Even then, a large proportion of manufacturing output came from small-scale, traditional units of production.18 During the nineteenth century, Britain’s manufacturing superiority and share of world trade helped transform London into the “natural” commercial and financial center of the world system. But commerce and finance were never simply extensions of, or subordinate to, industry. British commerce and finance expanded, at least in part, independently of industry and remained vital even after the decline of British industry. Rather, commerce, finance, and industry complemented and mutually reinforced one another. Britain’s financial and commercial dominance extended British economic power beyond the power that flowed from productive capital. The concentration of financial and commercial activity in Britain facilitated the expansion of material production in the world economy. Not only did London serve as the clearinghouse for world trade, but British credit and financial mediation created markets for Britain’s staple exports and secured the raw material as inputs necessary for industry. The productive edge provided by the cotton industry changed the material composition of the world division of labor and expanded British export and import markets. It increased the volume and velocity of commodities flowing through the British entrepôt. This configuration of finance, commerce, and industrial production established British hegemony over the world economy and shaped the nineteenth-century cycle of accumulation. The circuiT of coTTon

The Industrial Revolution in Britain meant the switch from woolens to cotton in its textile manufacturing and from sugar to cotton in its overseas trade. Cotton goods were produced on an unprecedented scale and required massive quantities of raw material. Between 1780 and the mid-nineteenth century, cotton consumption by British mills increased from 2,000 to 250,000

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tons. By 1825, cotton surpassed sugar as the leading product in British trade. For the first time, an industrial raw material rather than a foodstuff became the leading import to Britain. The cotton industry dominated British foreign trade from the 1830s to the 1870s, when raw cotton provided the most valuable import and re-export commodity, and cotton manufactures were the most valuable export good. The development of cotton manufacture depended on overseas and colonial trade. British cottons enjoyed a protected home market during the eighteenth century, but more extensive overseas markets offered the opportunity for rapid expansion. British domination of world markets, colonial expansion, and state policy created the scope for economic activity that allowed for the industrialization of the cotton industry. Price competition, substitution of cotton for other textiles, and, above all, the use of colonial legislation to destroy the rival Indian textile industry created the demand for British cottons. While the entire supply of raw material had to be imported, foreign consumer markets enabled the cotton industry to grow more rapidly than the rest of the British economy.19 By 1805, two-thirds of the output of the cotton industry was exported. After 1815, the volume of cotton exports rose rapidly. During the post-Napoleonic decades, cotton manufactures accounted for one-half of all British exports and one-fifth of imports.20 During this period, however, the United States and Europe began to adopt measures to protect their home markets from British cotton manufactures, and British industrialists increasingly had to seek new outlets for their goods in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. British cotton exports altered the pattern of world trade. Because of the remarkably elastic demand for cotton and virtually unlimited supply of raw material, the volume of cotton exports grew rapidly as technological innovation reduced the cost of the finished product. The growing productive capacity of British industry encouraged importing countries to increase their production (primarily of food and raw materials) and stimulate free trade (especially to Britain) to generate the income necessary to purchase British products.21 Britain’s industrial centers consumed enormous amounts of cotton, other raw materials, and food from peripheral producers. However, because increasing industrial productivity reduced costs and reduced export prices, the value of British exports was less than the value of imports.22 Britain’s industrial economy ran at a permanent balance of trade deficit during the nineteenth century. Earnings from the export of manufactured goods did not offset the cost of importing food and raw materials. Significantly, London played a critical role in clearing international balances of payments. The

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range of London’s commercial and financial activities—including shipping, insurance, banking, and financing foreign trade; commissions; discounting bills of exchange; money markets; and income from foreign investments— offset this deficit and produced a balance of payments surplus.23 Cotton was a relatively unimportant item in British trade before the 1780s. It was more expensive than English wool, and supplies came from the Levant, the West Indies, and the US South. The United States primarily exported long-staple Sea Island cotton whose production was confined to the coastal strip of South Carolina and Georgia. However, the invention in 1793 of the cotton gin made the commercial cultivation of short-staple upland cotton feasible. Upland cotton produced by slave labor spread across the South and broke the dependence of the British cotton industry on limited traditional sources of supply.24 The unprecedented growth of cotton cultivation in the US South matched the expansion of cotton manufacture in Britain. By 1820, the South was the world’s leading cotton producer and virtually monopolized the supply of cotton for British industry.25 Total US output increased remarkably each decade before the Civil War. Production went from 6,000 bales in 1820 to almost 5 million bales in 1860 as the “Cotton Kingdom” expanded. Between 1815 and the Civil War, the United States supplied over three-fourths of the raw cotton consumed in Britain, and US production determined the price of cotton in world markets.26 The expansion of cotton production in the slave South more than kept pace with the demand of the British cotton industry and altered the structure of the world’s textile supply. British demand for cotton opened a new commodity frontier in the US South. Far from assuming it to be the continuation of existing relations and practices, we need to note the innovative character of the cotton South. Cotton was in many respects a new product. Its suitability to the soil and climatic conditions of the southern United States changed the relations of land, labor, supply, and demand. The virtually unlimited demand for cotton created a “moving commodity frontier.”27 Through migration and the internal slave trade, geographically mobile slave labor animated the westward expansion of cotton cultivation. The steamship and railroad broke the transportation barrier. The US Cotton Belt was established on a continental scale. Migratory plantation agriculture and itinerant slave labor combined and recombined across the South to exploit new spaces and create new configurations of land, slave labor, and capital beyond the maritime Atlantic complex. The reduction of raw material prices was perhaps the most important factor in the expansion of the cotton industry and its ability to open new

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markets. The opening of the Cotton Belt resulted in a long-term decline in the price of raw cotton, which, in turn, provided the crucial impetus to the growth of the cotton industry. The cost of raw cotton was the largest element in the cost of manufactured goods; its reduction was crucial in lowering the cost of manufactured cotton and growing the markets for finished goods.28 Expansion into new lands, especially in the western American southern states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee), and concentration of slave labor increased productivity and reduced the price of cotton: average cotton exports per slave rose from 83 pounds in 1820 to 143 pounds in 1830, 295 pounds in 1840, and 337 pounds in 1850.29 According to D. A. Farnie, historian of the British cotton industry: The greatest single advantage enjoyed by the industry after 1801 undoubtedly lay in its access to an ample supply of cheap raw material. . . . The price of cotton manufactures did not begin to decline until a vast new source of supply of cotton was opened up in America and freed the industry from dependence on the inelastic supply of Sea Island cotton and upon the restricted export of the West Indies, Brazil, or the East Indies. . . . The productivity of American agriculture proved of unprecedented and unparalleled importance in reducing the costs of British industry. The decline in cotton prices made a far larger contribution throughout the whole of the nineteenth century to the reduction in the price of manufactures than either cost-cutting technological innovations or improvements in labor productivity.30 Underwriting the expansion of the cotton South were British financial and commercial facilities. If London was the heart of a financial system that circulated credit worldwide, then cotton factors were the capillaries of that system. Through a credit structure that ran from London to New York, the cotton factors provided the advances that allowed planters on the cotton frontier to buy more land and slaves, and they organized the financial and payment systems that enabled the crop to be marketed.31 By 1833, factoring had incorporated three-quarters of the cotton crop. Commissions, interest, freight, insurance, and service charges transferred the surplus of plantation production into the hands of merchants and factors who bought the crop and provided credit and supplies. Financial expansion, marked by the emergence of London’s short-term discount market, generalized the availability of credit to planters and reinforced specialization in cotton production. The close interdependence of credit flows and commodity exchange generalized

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more uniform market relations and transformed the character of the slave regime. Generalized access to credit “democratized” the planter class and rewarded commercial success. The integration of cotton slavery into the global circuit of industrial capital reinforced pressure on the productivity of labor and resulted in the “militarization” of plantation administration, the spread of collective gang labor under close supervision, and unprecedented concern on the part of planters for efficient labor management.32 The slave South’s domination of world cotton markets played a key role in creating new circuits for plantation staples and in stimulating the development of new zones of slave production outside the orbit of the British Empire. Raw cotton, as we have seen, was the major US export to Britain; on the other hand, the United States was not reciprocally a major market for British manufactures. Consequently the United States had an enormous balance of trade surplus with Britain and used these surpluses to become the major consumer of Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee (these were products for which there was no market in Britain).33 In this way, slave-produced cotton in the United States promoted the expansion of slavery elsewhere in the hemisphere and consolidated a new world division of labor. At the same time, these new zones of slave commodity production in the Americas were at once sustained by and benefited British finance and commerce. Exchanges between the United States, Cuba, and Brazil were evaluated in sterling and settled by shifting accounts in Britain. British credit facilities promoted the expansion of material production and consolidated new slave regimes more able to meet the demands of expanding world markets throughout the hemisphere. By encouraging multilateral commodity trade, Britain increased its opportunities for invisible earnings from banking, finance, shipping, insurance, and other services and appropriated surpluses from the global productive and trading system it had organized.34 concLusion

Attention to the processes that restructured the nineteenth-century world economy enables us to recuperate and reinterpret Eric Williams’s concern with capitalist development and the economic crises of slavery and monopoly in the British West Indies. From this perspective, the crises are not understood as the direct consequence of the linear displacement of slavery in the British West Indies by expanding industrial capitalism; rather, they are interpreted as part of the material expansion of the world economy, the

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organization of new transnational circuits of commodity production, and the transformation of the world division of labor occurring through the interplay of finance, commerce, and industry during the first half of the nineteenth century. Here British industrialization and slavery in the Americas both produced and were produced by these complex and multifaceted processes. The most immediate manifestation and proximate cause of the crises was the emergence of new slave production zones that were more attuned to the conditions of the world market than were the British West Indies. These new regions—the North American Cotton Belt, the Cuban sugar zone, and the Brazilian coffee zone—created new conditions of world staple production to which the West Indian colonies were unable to respond adequately. Cuban sugar production superseded that of the British West Indies, but more importantly, US cotton production articulated a new relation of slaveproducing regions to the world economy. Thus the approach proposed here calls attention to the expansion and differentiation of slavery in the Americas and, further, to the importance of slave labor in generating the growth and reorganization of world markets and international division of labor. By focusing on the long-term transformation of world production and slavery in the Americas, we are better able to contextualize antislavery action, whether in the metropolis or the colony. Thereby we are again allowed to pose—albeit from a new perspective—the question of the relation between economic crisis and the politics of slave emancipation. noTes 1. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, ix. 2. See, e.g., Carrington, Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England; Darity, “British Industry and the West Indies Plantations”; Darity, “Numbers Game and the Profitability of the British Trade in Slaves”; Bailey, “Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States”; Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. 3. Hopkins, “World-Systems Analysis,” 145–58. 4. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 95–119. 5. Hilton, “Capitalism—What’s in a Name?” 32–43. 6. Palmer, introduction to Capitalism and Slavery, xvi. 7. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 131–34. 8. Ibid., 135–53. 9. See Wallerstein, The Modern World System and The Capitalist World-Economy; Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century.

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10. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 47–58, 159–238. 11. See Ingham, Capitalism Divided; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism. 12. Ingham, Capitalism Divided, 97; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 46–104. 13. Ingham, Capitalism Divided, 33. 14. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 19; Ingham, Capitalism Divided, 113. 15. Ingham, Capitalism Divided, 91–113. 16. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 126–34; Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 76. 17. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 109–32. 18. Samuel, “The Workshop of the World”; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 68–69. 19. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 48–53; Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 65–67. 20. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 89–90; Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 69. 21. Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 9–10. 22. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 89–90; Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 69; Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 66–67; Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 9–14; Shapiro, Capital and the Cotton Industry, 202–3. 23. Imlah, Economic Elements, 40–41; Ingham, Capitalism Divided, 40–41, 98–99. 24. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 82–83. 25. Ibid., 11–12; Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 47–48. 26. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 15; Gray, History of Agriculture, 2, 691. 27. Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early-Modern World Economy.” 28. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 82–83. 29. Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 165–66. 30. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 82–83; Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil, 112–13; Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 66–67. 31. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 162–63; Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 30–31. 32. McMichael, “Slavery in the Regime of Wage Labor,” 18–19; Marquese, Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente, 337–76; Berlin, Many Thousand Gone, 311–12; Whartenby, Land and Labor Productivity. 33. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 56–71; Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 2–3; Farnie, The English Cotton Industry, 9–11. 34. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 56–71; McMichael, “Slavery in the Regime of Wage Labor,” 325–29.

afTerWord reflections on eric Williams and the challenges of Postcolonial caribbean Political Leadership david hinds

This afterword is not a treatise on Eric Williams as a person or public icon. Rather, it is a reflection on Williams as part of the “independence generation” of Caribbean leaders. Dr. Williams remains one of the most important public figures in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean. He was undoubtedly the first among equals of the independence leaders. While some were intellectually gifted and academically well qualified, and all of them possessed a vision of what Caribbean independence should mean, none of the others combined all the attributes with such consummate ease as Eric Williams. Only C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney could match Williams in this regard; he was to public life what Garfield Sobers, the Mighty Sparrow, and Bob Marley were to cricket, calypso, and reggae respectively. As the contributors to this volume have pointed out, Williams’s importance springs from his dominant influence in the areas of politics and scholarship. From varying standpoints, the authors have explained, critiqued, and elaborated on his legacy. What is clear is that it is impossible to assess the history and politics of the postcolonial Caribbean without confronting the constant presence of Eric Williams. But in the final analysis, one of the persistent questions that arises from this or any study of Williams and his generation of politicians is this: what does their praxis tell us about Caribbean postcolonialism and the dreams of freedom promised by independence? Any evaluation of independence and freedom in the Caribbean is by necessity an evaluation of Williams’s generation. Six decades after the first countries achieved independence from Britain, their achievements and failures, singularly and collectively, are measured largely against the actions and inactions of their independence leaders. There is a compelling reason for this: the independence movement remains the region’s most defining movement for change since emancipation. Subsequent movements, such as the 186

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Black Power, regional integration, and antidictatorial movements, while significant in many ways, did not carry with them the same historical burden as the independence movement. The attainment of adult suffrage and limited self-government in the Anglophone Caribbean at the end of World War II saw the rise of mass political parties, groups that generally emerged out of the labor movement that had hitherto led the anticolonial struggle. These parties reflected a unity between the emerging Creole middle class and the working class based on common opposition to colonial rule. In this regard, the working class, or “barefoot” leaders of the trade unions, gave way to the newly educated class that had returned to the region after studying abroad. The latter group, which included Dr. Williams, assumed the reins of government at the time of independence, an era that began in 1962 when Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica gained theirs. This leadership soon found that political independence did not automatically lead to economic independence. The political and economic systems inherited at the time of independence were not meant for liberation; in fact, they served to ensure the continued political and economic dependency of the region. The political system was based on the Westminster majoritarian model, transferred to the region by the British with minor modifications. On the economic front, the region continued producing resources to satisfy the needs of others, not for its own consumption and sustainability. Central to this scenario was the foreign ownership of the means of production, particularly by the indigenous expatriate elite class. The primary challenge for the region was therefore: How to create new nations out of the legacy of slavery and colonialism? How to create a national economy that responded foremost to the needs of the Caribbean people? How to create nations that reflected the identity of their peoples rather than their former masters? How to create a political democracy from a history and culture heavily influenced by the authoritarianism of slavery and colonialism? How to transform a region of poverty into a commonwealth of opportunity and material advance? In a frank assessment of the Caribbean leadership at the time of independence, James observed that “they have no trace of political tradition. Until twenty years ago they had no experience of political parties or of government. . . . Knowledge of production, of political struggles, of the democratic tradition they have none.”1 This condition, according to James, was reflected in the reformist outlook of the leaders, what he calls “the thin substance of the class” from which they came. Eusi Kwayana, one of Guyana’s independence

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leaders, contends that the Caribbean leadership was part of the negotiated settlement at the time of independence. According to Kwayana, the independence leadership arose from the British “manipulation and maneuvers in selecting a congenial group of ruling cadres for the independent nation.”2 While James’s harsh critique was no doubt influenced by his frustrations with the direction of the Williams government, he did put his finger on something important: the task of governance in the postcolonial era immediately presented formidable challenges for the new leadership. Although some of these men had served in the colonial legislatures, they lacked the necessary experience to manage the state, particularly the executive branch. Because the withdrawing rulers left a political order whose democratic form masked a less-than-democratic content, the new leaders were challenged with both maintaining the integrity of whatever democratic forms they inherited from the British and upgrading them to confront and overcome the endemic inequalities left behind. This group was also challenged to balance the competing demands of the two dominant groups in the society: the middle class, who were also the economic elite, and the working poor. The latter group, which had fueled the anticolonial rebellion, had definite expectations of the new political order in terms of their newfound power and social well-being. The alliance with the intellectual class, so pivotal to the success of the independence movement, was expected to continue in the postcolonial era, thus leading to a society in which the working class would be brought into the mainstream. On the other hand, the economic elite, those who owned and controlled the means of production at the time of independence, also had definite expectations of the new state: protection of private property and implementation of policies to facilitate a business-friendly economy. This balancing act had to be achieved within the context of the Cold War and a global economic order that militated against equality for small developing economies. conTexTuaLizing WiLLiams: Promise and chaLLenges

Independence from colonial rule symbolized the final breaking of slavery’s chains. The significance of this moment cannot be underestimated, as it was both the culmination of centuries of oppression and the reaching for a new freedom. But while independence meant deliverance from enslavement, it also signaled the threat of a new form of subjugation in the form of neocolonialism.

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Like most of his independence colleagues, Williams was a product of the Caribbean landscape. Born into the poverty of colonialism but capitalizing on the limited space afforded to blacks for social mobility, Williams embodied a new Caribbean sense of itself. In the Williamses, Manleys, Adamses, Burnhams, and Barrowses, the Caribbean had discovered a cadre of warriors on whose shoulders fell the burden of navigating the journey to, and constructing the architecture for, that freedom. The central question around which revolves all other questions of Caribbean postcolonial experience is how the promise of postcolonial freedom turned into unfreedom. Since the Williams generation was tasked with creating the architecture for independence, the answer by necessity is found against the background of the choices made by or foisted on these leaders. Where does Eric Williams stand in all of this? As a trained historian, he possessed a sharper sense of the past than his colleagues. He was obviously keenly aware that the challenges and possibilities of postcolonialism could not be overcome outside the region’s historical experiences. In other words, the present would amount to despair and disintegration if it was not constructed on the lessons of the past. Did Williams bring to bear his understanding of history to the practice of politics and political management? The answer is twofold. There can be no doubt that his anticolonial rhetoric of “Massa Day Done,” which was largely influenced by his understanding of “living history,” is a pivotal intervention. Williams’s management of the independence movement projected him as the revolutionary with a sense of history and a vision for the future. The second part of the answer lies in how he managed postcolonial Trinidad, attempting to balance the competing demands of the independent states by using the historically entrenched vestiges of colonial constructs. Society reveals him to be a somewhat ambivalent reformer for whom tactical pragmatism eventually became a substitute for vision. To some extent, Williams was a victim of circumstances beyond his control. His sometimes authoritarian methods arose from the need to hold a fragile independence together in the face of external and internal demands. Williams’s scholarship falls into the radical Caribbean tradition. His Capitalism and Slavery remains a classic in black and Caribbean historiography. He was arguably the pioneer of a new approach to the history of the African diaspora. In this regard, he opened the door for later radical historians such as Elsa Goveia, Walter Rodney, and Hilary Beckles. This is an important aspect of Williams’s contribution to the Caribbean, which is often ignored or marginalized in the face of emphasizing his political contributions. While

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the two concepts cannot be separated entirely, one could argue that Williams’s politics did not always reflect his scholarship. The scholarship helped lay the philosophical and theoretical foundations for understanding the Caribbean reality. It helped to put into place a Caribbean that could understand itself, its origins, its struggle, and its aspirations. Williams’s scholarship was an act of defiance. Here was a colonial scholar pushing the limits of colonialism by challenging the premise of its intellectual foundations. This is a tremendous undertaking for which Williams was not socialized; hence it stands as the great significance of his academic work. Williams would transfer this academic intellect and style to the public space upon his return to Trinidad. His early political praxis was therefore an extension of his radical scholarship. The lectures at the University of Woodford Square were not political theater; they were an authentic discourse with a mass of people who were ready to make the final break with the past. Williams was seen as the embodiment of this desire. His grasp of history proved to be the mobilizing tool of the masses because it was this very history of disempowerment and powerlessness that the Caribbean people were trying to overcome. Here was the radical scholar becoming the radical political actor in an environment that was ready-made for such radicalism. Williams faced two difficult challenges during his tenure. The first was to build a nation out of the competing ethnic groups in the country, particularly the Africans and East Indians; how was a black radical to do this? While his appeal to Africans was based principally on ethnic grounds, this was not the case with East Indians. He had to convince them that an independent Trinidad under his leadership would protect and promote their interests. In the final analysis, he did not win them over. As Colin Palmer argues: His message had a far greater resonance among African Trinidadians than Indo-Trinidadians and other groups. Blacks, particularly those who were young, working class, urban, and literate, identified with the brilliant black historian to a degree that other ethnic groups never approximated.3 Studies of ethnically polarized societies have shown that this most difficult undertaking is one that no single leader has yet been able to solve. Williams’s approach ranged from frustration with the Indians’ charges of marginalization to a genuine attempt to create a “nonracial” or “race-neutral” Trinidad. His descriptions of Indians as “recalcitrant” and a “hostile minority of the West Indian nation” have correctly been characterized by Palmer as

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“harsh and intemperate,”4 although it is not clear whether Williams was referring to the entire group or singling out those who voted for the opposition at the federal elections. Either way, these were defining statements in framing the discourse on the role of Indians in a West Indian nation—a conversation that still rages today. Williams’s nonracial approach, then, was premised on the notion that Indians had no choice but to join the new Trinidadian and West Indian nations. Toward this end, he opted for co-optation of major Indian leaders and a “de-Africanization” of the country. This nonracial nationalism had been the preferred approach for most leaders of the postcolonial world and one that elicits great sympathy, especially in Williams’s case. He, like the leaders of the People’s Progressive Party in Guyana, must have been encouraged by the multiethnic anticolonial agitation and obviously thought that therein lay the making of a new multiethnic state. Five decades later, we know that multiethnic protest and resistance do not automatically translate into viable multiethnic nations. The big problem in the case of Trinidad and Tobago was the “winner-take-all” system that Williams embraced, creating a tension between ethnic democracy and electoral democracy. One may conclude, therefore, that Williams’s attempt at meeting the ethnic challenge did not succeed largely because he may have underestimated that tension and overestimated his own ability to transcend the ethnic divide. Like most leaders in similar situations, Williams opted to win elections by depending on his own ethnic group while hoping to govern on behalf of all groups. He soon found out that this was a difficult undertaking. Even as he grappled with the ethnic question, Williams had before him the class question: how to deal with the demands of local and foreign capital within the context of the Cold War while delivering his promises to the working people. How was he to transform what Lloyd Best, one of Williams’s fiercest critics, called the “plantation economy” into a viable, equitable economy? How was he to ensure an equitable distribution of opportunities and resources without inviting the accusation of communism? How was he to attract the private capital needed to aid the development process without invoking calls of neocolonialism and pro-capitalism? Williams, through a combination of pragmatism and circumstances beyond his control, opted for an open dependency in which the state retained some degree of influence, and therefore he did not alienate the local business class or the forces of international capital. But this came with a price: he became the target of the gathering Black Power Movement, which charged him with neglecting his nation’s black poor.

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This must have been a most difficult period for Williams. After all, he was one of the fathers of Caribbean radicalism. Some of the Black Power leaders were partly radicalized by his academic work; in effect, these activists were his political children. But perhaps they had not forgiven Williams for his falling out with C. L. R. James, his onetime mentor and the radicals’ ideological and intellectual inspiration, over the issue of a West Indian federation. Williams’s Trinidad became the most vivid theater of the Black Power showdown. At the end of it all, Williams, more than all his fellow leaders, conceded much to the Black Power movement and yet contended with new demands from the movement’s transmogrification to “People’s Power.” For these citizens, the Williams reforms were not enough; the new government had intrinsic failings and had to go. Again, Williams had to make a difficult choice: use the heavy hand of the state or support a revolution that would consume him? The task was how to contain this radicalism while maintaining a democratic polity. As was the case with the ethnic question, Williams did not achieve the balance he had hoped for. concLusion

What is the political legacy of Eric Williams for Trinidad and the Caribbean? It is one of mixed or definitive feelings depending from which side of the political divide one views him. As a political mobilizer, he was second to none. As the leader of the nation, he made choices that alienated key segments of his citizenry although he managed, despite challenges, to hold the state and society together. Was Williams an authoritarian leader? In some regards he was, but that must be located within the context of an almost godlike adulation by his colleagues and followers. That his People’s National Movement party lost power a mere five years after he died could be interpreted as either that Williams was the sole embodiment of the party or that the society had turned on him by the time he died. This ambiguity echoes the duality he continually faced throughout his political life. Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the Williams journey is how yesterday’s radical can become today’s reformer or conservative. While pragmatism is often the most reachable tool of governance, especially in the postcolonial Caribbean, it is often the facilitator of a new radicalism that can inherently undermine its effectiveness. Eric Williams epitomized a radical symbol of reformation who was eventually transformed into a conservative by the seemingly overbearing challenges confronting him.

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noTes 1. James, Party Politics in the West Indies, 122–23. 2. Kwayana, “Post-independent Experiences in the Caribbean,” 3. 3. Palmer, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, 263. 4. Ibid., 267.

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BiBLiograPhy “Activities of Uriah Butler, Appendix L: Extract from Report on Butlerite Meeting held at Woodford Square, September 5, 1952.” Personal and confidential letter from Governor H. E. Rance to S. E. V. Luke, Esq., dated September 11, 1953. (British) National Archives, CO 1031/964 WIS 501/12/03. Alexander, W. J. “Birth of the PNM and Its Descent into the Political Arena.” Nation, January 21, 1966. Allahar, Anton, ed. Caribbean Charisma: Reflections on Leadership, Legitimacy, and Populist Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. “Background Information on the Caribbean Commission, by Mr. Mackay.” Attachment to confidential office memo. US National Archives. October 24, 1949. Bailey, Ronald. “The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England.” Social Science History 14, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 373–414. Bartley, Milton. “Williams: I’ll Crush the Marxists.” Evening News, October 5, 1966. Beckles, Hilary, MCD. “‘The Williams Effect’: Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy.” In British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Benn, Denis. The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, 1774–2003. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2004. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousand Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Best, Lloyd. “The Movement Leadership vs. Prophecy.” Tapia, November 16, 1969. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492– 1800. London: Verso, 1997. Boodhoo, Ken I. “Economic Thoughts and Economic Policy.” In Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader, ed. Ken I. Boodhoo. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. ———. The Elusive Eric Williams. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Prospect Press, 2002. ———, ed. Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. Bosch, Gerald R. “Eric Williams and the Moral Rhetoric of Dependency Theory.” Callaloo 20, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 817. 194

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conTriBuTors sharon aLexander-gooding earned a master’s degree in archives and records management from the University of British Columbia, a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of the West Indies, and is completing her PhD in history, focusing on the development of record keeping in the Caribbean. Presently she simultaneously holds the positions of senior assistant registrar campus records manager and part-time lecturer in heritage studies at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies and is the university archivist for the four campuses of the UWI. She is honorary adviser to the Barbados Association of Records and Information Management, a member of the Barbados Government’s Archives Board, and a trustee of the Association of Information Management Professionals International’s Educational Foundation. roLand g. BaPTisTe, Phd , is a retired senior lecturer for the Department of Management Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where he earned his doctorate in management in 2009. Before his position with UWI, Dr. Baptiste served the government of Trinidad and Tobago for more than seventeen years. A noted authority on the subject of resource management, Dr. Baptiste has written articles on the Caribbean banking industry, the Trinidadian post office system, and the privatization of water supplies. Among his published work is the book Human Resource Management: A Reader for Students and Practitioners (2011). Dr. Baptiste earned both his BA and MA from Howard University and holds an MS in management education and organization change from the University of Manchester (UK) Institute of Science and Technology. Tomeiko ashford carTer, Phd , is the author of Powers Divine (2008), a treatise connecting nineteenth-century spiritual autobiography to contemporary spiritual fiction. She is also the author of Virginia Broughton: The Life and Writings of a National Baptist Missionary (2010), an annotated compendium of the spiritual achievements and works of Broughton as a 209

210

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nineteenth- and twentieth-century National Baptist missionary. Dr. Carter earned her BA from the University of Florida and holds master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she served as the associate director of the Institute of African American Research. WiLLiam dariTy Jr., Phd , is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of

Public Policy, African, and African American Studies and the director of the Duke Consortium on Social Equity at Duke University. Dr. Darity’s areas of expertise include racial and economic inequality, stratification economics, racial achievement gaps in education, and financial crises in developing countries. He has published ten books, most recently as editor of the new edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008), and more than two hundred scholarly journal articles. Since earning his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Darity has taught at several US colleges and universities. He has also served as director of the Institute of African American Research and as director of graduate studies in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. granT farred, Phd , is a professor at Cornell University. His most re-

cent book is In Motion, at Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). His previous works include What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (Prickly Paradigm, 2006), and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (Temple University Press, 2008). He served as general editor of the Duke University–based South Atlantic Quarterly from 2002 to 2010. He is the editor of the forthcoming book series Thinking Theory Now (Stanford University Press). His forthcoming book is Conciliation (Temple University Press).

david hinds, Phd , is an associate professor in the African and African

American Studies Department at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He holds both doctorate and master’s degrees in political science from Howard University and earned his bachelor’s from the University of the District of Columbia. He is a political scientist who specializes in Caribbean and African diaspora politics and society. His areas of teaching and research are race, ethnicity, and politics in the Caribbean, with an emphasis on Guyana; Caribbean governance and politics; and Caribbean

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and African diaspora popular culture (music and sports) as political expression. Dr. Hinds is the author of three books and several scholarly articles on Caribbean politics and society. His books are Race and Political Discourse in Guyana (2004), Ethno-Politics and Power Sharing in Guyana: History and Discourse (2011), and Bob Marley: Lyrics of Resistance (2014). Dr. Hinds is a regular media contributor through his work as an op-ed writer and columnist, television host, and radio commentator. ceciLia mcaLmonT , now retired, was head of the University of Guy-

ana’s (UG’s) Department of Social Studies in the School of Education, where she taught Caribbean history and world civilization. She holds a BA in history from UG and won that department’s prestigious Earl Atlee Prize in 1974. She continued her studies there, earning a master’s degree in Guyanese and West Indian history with the dissertation “The Honorable Peter Rose: A Study in Opposition,” and then an MPhil in economic development from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where she won the 1989 Gerry Mueller Memorial Prize for best dissertation of the year (“The Evolution of the Bilateral Investment Treaty: A View from the Developing Country Perspective”). Her main research interests are the contribution of Guyanese women to that country’s development, the impact of NGOs since the last decades of the twentieth century, and the connection between Eric Williams and Forbes Burnham.

rex neTTLeford was a Jamaican scholar, social critic, political commentator, and choreographer who died in February 2010, one day before his seventy-seventh birthday. Born and educated in Jamaica, Professor Nettleford earned an honors degree in history from UWI and a postgraduate degree in politics from Oxford, the result of his 1957 Rhodes Scholarship. Nettleford founded Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre in 1963 and served as UWI’s University Singers’ artistic director for more than twenty years and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies for over seven years. A noted authority on Caribbean cultural studies, Nettleford was named vicechancellor emeritus of UWI in 1996 and later in his career served as Jamaica’s ambassador-at-large. His published works include Mirror, Mirror (1969), Manley and the New Jamaica (1971), and Caribbean Cultural Identity (2003). Tanya L. shieLds, Phd , is associate professor of women’s and gender

studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature at the University of Maryland at College

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Park and has published articles on Pauline Melville, Rawle Gibbons, and transnationalism, as well as the role of art in knowledge production and politics. Dr. Shields recently completed her first book, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (University of Virginia Press, 2014). She is at work on a new project, “Gendered Labor: Place and Power on Female-Owned Plantations,” and serves on the board of directors for Carivision, a Caribbean-centered theater group. maurice sT. Pierre, Phd , retired as professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He is the author of Anatomy of Resistance: Anti-colonialism in Guyana, 1823–1966 (1999) and Eric Williams and the Anticolonial Tradition: The Making of a Diasporan Intellectual (University of Virginia Press, 2015); several articles and book chapters on the sociology of the Caribbean; and the chapter “Martin Luther King Jr. as a Social Movement Intellectual: Trailblazer or Torchbearer?” in an anthology from Lexington Press (2012). Dr. St. Pierre earned a BS in sociology (with a minor concentration in economics) from the University of London and went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in the same subject from McGill University and the UWI respectively. Jerome TeeLucksingh, Phd , is a lecturer of Caribbean history in

UWI’s Department of History in Trinidad. He was the first recipient of UWI’s Eric Williams Memorial Scholarship, which enabled him to pursue postgraduate research on Caribbean history. During the past five years, he has published chapters in the following edited works: Revisiting Slave Narratives (2005), Religious Writings and War (2006), and Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World (2006). His recent books are Caribbean Liberators (2013) and Caribbean Empire (2014). Additionally, Dr. Teelucksingh has organized a number of scholarly conferences and public seminars focusing on the prominent West Indian personalities Henry Sylvester Williams, Adrian Cola Rienzi, Dr. Rudranath Capildeo, and George Padmore. He is also a playwright and poet.

daLe Tomich, Phd , is a professor of sociology and history at Bing-

hamton University in Binghamton, New York. Dr. Tomich earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and focuses his research on the subject of Atlantic slavery in the modern world-economy. He is author of Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (2003) and numerous articles. He has produced

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the documentary film Caribbean Journey: Conversations with Sidney Mintz (Binghamton, NY: Fernand Braudel Center, 2014) and counts filmmaking among his many credits. erica WiLLiams conneLL is the daughter of Eric Williams and,

since his death, has considered his teachings and writings to be her heritage and the dissemination of these her personal odyssey. As curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives & Museum (EWMC) at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago campus, Ms. Williams Connell travels the world to bring her father—the politician, the intellectual, the man—to an international audience and to place his accomplishments in a global context. In 1999 she established Florida International University’s annual Eric Williams lecture series, which invites African American diaspora politicians, historians, and artistes to share their views on a variety of topics. Exposing her father to a new generation of scholars is important and meaningful to Williams Connell, and she views his continued relevance as being borne out by the fact that his seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery, which arguably rewrote the historiography of the transatlantic slave trade, has recently been published in Turkish (2014), with a Korean edition in process. “We are giving life to the notion that ‘History Provides the Blueprint,’” says Williams Connell. “It is no accident that these have become the watchwords of the EWMC.”

index Adams, Grantley, 33, 139, 189; West Indies Federation and, 103, 104 African Caribbean Pacific grouping (ACP), 83, 86 Agricultural Development Bank, 143 Alexander, A. A., 57 Alexander, Cecil, 57, 128 Alexander, W. J., 57 Alexander-Gooding, Sharon, 16 All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Trade Union (ATSE+FWTU), 138, 141–42 Amalgamated Workers’ Union, 138 American Indians, 4, 60, 112 Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC), 52. See also Caribbean Commission Anstey, Robert, 172 Antigua, 81, 107n21; black suffrage in, 116, 187; CARIFTA and, 102; labor movement of, 139 Aristotle, 49 Arrighi, Giovanni, 177 Arthur, Owen, 94 Asian Indians. See East Indian immigrants Bachacs study group, 56, 63, 67 Balassa, Bela, 95n3 Bank Workers Trade Union, 143 Baptiste, Roland G., 18 Barbados, 75, 81; CARIFTA and, 102; color stratification in, 109, 114; labor movement of, 139; sugar industry, 111; University of West Indies in, vii; West 214

Indies Federation and, 80–81, 99–103, 106, 107n21 Barrow, Errol, 80, 81, 189 Beckford, George, 86 Beckles, Hilary, 68, 189–90 Belize, 80, 86 Belmanna riots, 20n9 Best, Lloyd, 36n8, 139, 191 Bhabha, Homi, 12 Bird, Vere, 81, 139 Bishop, Maurice, 27, 36n10 Bishop, William Howard, 129 Black Jacobins, The ( James), 45–46, 167, 170 Black Power Movement, 8–10, 34, 191–92; CARIFTA and, 93; independence movement and, 186–87; oil industry and, 122–23, 136, 154 Blake, Byron, 96n42 Boodhoo, Ken, 90, 118 Bourdieu, Pierre, 39, 46 Bowrin, George, 132 Brazil, 111, 183; coffee production by, 174, 182–84 Brereton, Bridget, 5, 20n8 Bressler, Charles, 8 British Guiana, 54–55; black suffrage in, 116, 187; labor movement in, 139; West Indies Federation and, 80, 96n45, 105. See also Guyana British Honduras, 80, 86 British West Indian Airways (BWIA), 22n39, 101–2, 104, 137 British West Indian University (Williams), 48, 69n39

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Brotherhood of Construction and Industrial Workers’ Union, 138 Bunche, Ralph, 47 Burnham, Forbes, 91–94, 189; CARICOM and, 86–87, 92; CARIFESTA and, 81; CARIFTA and, 91; Chaguaramas Treaty and, 88; West Indies Federation and, 80–81; Williams and, 15–16, 76–77, 93–94 Bustamante, Alexander, 27, 33, 103–4, 139 Butler, Tubal Uriah “Buzz,” 6, 21n31, 129; Home Rule Party of, 53, 54, 129; photograph of, 130; Williams on, 135 Cain, P. J., 178 calypso music, 4, 26–30, 37n15, 128; Carnival and, 4, 14, 22nn39–40, 29 Campbell, Carl, 41–42 Canaday, Ward, 51–52 Canboulay riots, 20n9 Capildeo, Rudranath, 128 capitalism, 34, 154; defining of, 175; globalization of, 173–74, 177, 179–84; hegemony and, 177–79. See also industrialization Capitalism and Slavery (Williams), 6–7, 47; Beckles on, 68; criticisms of, 135, 172–77; Farred on, 164–65; Hinds on, 189–90; James on, 46–47; Teelucksingh on, 126, 135; Tomich on, 18–19, 172–84; translations of, ix, 173 Caribbean Broadcasting Union, 81 Caribbean Commission, 48, 50; AACC and, 52; Research Council of, 7, 51; Williams’s dismissal from, 58–59 Caribbean Community (CARICOM), 29, 34–35, 77, 84–94; CARIFTA and, 84, 94, 105; globalization and, 99; Multilateral Clearing Facility and, 90; objectives of, 37n13, 85. See also West Indies Federation Caribbean Development Bank, 81 Caribbean Education Council, 81 Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), 81

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Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), 77, 82–84, 91, 93–94, 102; CARICOM and, 84, 94, 105 Caribbean Technical Assistance Programme, 81 Carnival, 4, 20n9, 26, 36n5, 58; calypso and, 4, 14, 22nn39–40, 29 Caroni sugar company, 143, 145 Castro, Fidel, 9, 30 Cedula of Population (1783), 4, 20n8 CET. See Common External Tariff Chaguaramas, Treaty of, 81, 84, 87–92, 94, 103 Chaguaramas naval base, 62–65, 163–70; James on, 102, 104, 130; US withdrawal from, 65, 102 Chambers, George, 155 Charles, Eugenia, 20n1 Chinese immigrants, 5, 9, 109, 115, 120–21 Cipriani, Andrew, 129 Civil Service Association, 138, 158n1; Public Service reform and, 18, 149–58 Coard, Bernard, coup by, 36n10 coffee production, 174, 182–84 Cold War, 130, 154, 168, 188, 191 color stratification, 4, 16–17, 31, 109–23; origins of, 113–15 “colorism,” 112, 116–20 Columbus, Christopher, 4, 35 Columbus, Diego, 111 Comma, Carlton, 55 Common External Tariff (CET), 84, 86, 95n3, 103 Common Market Council, 89 Communication and Transport Workers Trade Union, 138 Communication Workers Union (CWU), 138, 142 communism, 130, 154, 168, 188, 191; Cuban Revolution and, 9, 30; Grenada and, 36n10; Marx on, 169. See also socialism concubinage, slavery and, 113–14, 116

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Contractors and General Workers Trade Union, 138 Coppin, Addington, 109–10 Corn Laws, 175 cotton industry, 5, 174, 178–84 Creech-Jones, Arthur, 53–54 Crick, Bernard, 101 Critchlow, Nathaniel, 142 Cuba, 183; CARICOM and, 35; color stratification in, 109, 115, 119; Grenada and, 36n10; sugar production by, 174, 175, 180, 183, 184; West Indies Federation and, 80–81, 99, 106; Williams’s view of, 81 Cuban Revolution, 9, 30 Curaçao, 110–11 Cutteridge, J. O., 41–43 Davis, Basil, 9 Democratic Action Congress, 139 Democratic Labour Party (DLP), 129, 136–39 Destroyers for Bases Agreement, 5 Diaz, Nuevo, 136 Dickenson Bay Agreement, 81 domestic workers union, 143 Dominica, 20n1, 100, 101, 107n21 Dominican Republic, 80–81; CARICOM and, 35; color stratification in, 109, 112, 119 Donaldson, John S., 57, 59 Douglas, Carl, 136 Drescher, Seymour, 172 Dumas Committee, 155 Durkheim, Émile, 44 Dutch Guiana, 114 East Indian immigrants, 5, 9, 120–21, 139, 190–91; earnings differential among, 109–10; to Guyana, 115, 119. See also India Edmondson, Belinda, 10 Eltis, David, 172 Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC), vii–xi Ethiopia, 119

ethnicity, 109–13; mestizos and, 9, 17, 109, 112; nationalism and, 19, 120–21, 191 European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 82 Factory Workers Trade Union, 138, 141–42 Fanon, Frantz, 166, 167, 171n4 Farnie, D. A., 182 Farred, Grant, 18 Federated Workers Trade Union (FWTU), 138 Federation of Women’s Institutes, 57, 144 Ferguson, Tyrone, 91 Foucault, Michel, 40, 165 Franklin, John Hope, 48 Frazier, E. Franklin, 49 free men of color, 4, 20n8. See also mestizos From Columbus to Castro (Williams), 9, 30 Frost, Robert, ix Gairy, Eric, 27, 139 Gandhi, Mohandas, ix, 25, 40 Garvey, Marcus, 25, 33, 117 gender, earnings differential based on, 109–10 genotyping, 117. See also phenotyping Georgetown Accord, 81 Gilbert, Helen, 3–4, 8, 11 Gittens, Thomas, 78, 85–86 globalization, 85, 173–74, 177, 179–84. See also capitalism Goffman, Erving, 39 gold standard, 178 Gomes, Albert, 54, 129 Gopeesingh, Dalip, 132 Gordon, Marilyn, 57–58 Goveia, Else, 189–90 Government and Transport Workers Trade Union, 138 Gowandan, Krishna, 133 Grand Anse Declaration of 1989, 34, 38n30 Greenidge, Carl, 91

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Grenada, 92, 139; US invasion of, 36n10; West Indies Federation and, 107n21 griots, 22n40, 30 Guyana, 30, 36n4, 76, 81; CARICOM and, 86, 91–92; CARIFESTA in, 81; CARIFTA and, 102; independence of, 187–88; Indian immigrants of, 115, 119, 191; West Indies Federation and, 96n45, 102–3; Williams on, 92. See also British Guiana Habermas, Jürgen, 69n46 Haiti, 80–81; color stratification in, 109, 115, 119; Trujillo and, 112 Haitian Revolution, 20n8, 114; Farred on, 163, 167, 170, 171; James on, 45–46, 167, 170 Harnanan, Ivan C., 90 Harris, Abram, 47 Harris, Wilson, 3–4 Heads of Government Conferences (HGC), 79–81, 84, 89, 92–94, 102–3 Held, David, 12 Hinds, David, 19 Hochoy, Solomon, 130, 141 Holzberg, Carol S., 110–11 Home Rule Party, 54, 129; formation of, 53; People’s National Movement and, 21n31 Hopkins, A. G., 178 Hosay massacre of 1884, 20n9 Howard University, 6, 7, 47–48, 109, 126 Hughes, Owen, 157 Huskisson, William, 178 ILO. See International Labour Organisation independence movements, 186–89; Black Power and, 186–87; in India, 123; in Jamaica, 22n34, 106n1 India, 12, 123, 180. See also East Indian immigrants Industrial Court, 143, 152 Industrial Relations Acts, 136 Industrial Stabilization Act, 131, 134–36, 143

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industrialization, 99; of cotton industry, 179–84; mercantilism and, 175, 176; “substitution,” 86. See also capitalism Ingham, Geoffrey, 178 integration. See regional integration movement International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), 127–28, 140–41 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 127–28, 140, 143 Inward Hunger (Williams), 18, 41–43, 136, 149, 163–71 Jackson, Rashleigh, 91, 96n42 Jacques, Amy, 25 Jagan, Cheddi, 25, 55 Jagan, Janet, 19n1, 25, 36n4 Jamaica, 9, 12, 18, 32, 37n12; color stratification in, 112, 114, 116, 119; independence of, 22n34, 106n1; labor movement in, 139; Mexican trade with, 90; Sephardic Jews of, 110–11; socialist movement in, 37n20, 54; University of West Indies in, vii; West Indies Federation and, 32, 37n12, 80, 99–103, 106 James, C. L. R., 9, 16, 97, 136; on Chaguaramas naval base, 102, 104, 130; PNM and, 130–31; on political traditions, 187, 188; on Trinidad’s oil industry, 134, 142; on West Indies Federation, 103–4, 192; Workers and Farmers Party and, 132 Works: Beyond a Boundary, 44; The Black Jacobins, 45–46, 167, 170; The Case for West Indian Self-Government, 69n24; A Convention Appraisal, 39, 69n24 Jewish immigrants, 110–11, 115 Jim Crow laws, 117–18, 121 Jones, Beverly, 9 Jones, James M., 22n40 Kenyatta, Jomo, 166, 167, 169 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 40 Kwayana, Eusi, 187–88

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labor movements, 17–18, 126–46 Lamming, George, 29 Lancaster, Roger, 112 Lebanese immigrants, 109, 120 Lee, Ulric, 140, 149–50 Lewis, Arthur, 16, 97; economic theories of, 60, 107n22; labor theory of, 86; on West Indies Federation, 103 Lewis, Gordon, 77 Lewis, Vaughn, 83 Lewis, William Arthur, 21n31 Liverpool, Hollis Urban Lester (calypsonian), 27–29 Locke, Alain, 47 Logan, Rayford, 47 Lomé Convention, 83, 86 Loomba, Ania, 8 Lowenthal, David, 112–13 MacLeod, Iain, 103 Macqueripe Club, 63–64 Mahabir, Winston, 56 Maharaj, Chan, 136 Maharaj, Stephen, 132, 133 Mandela, Nelson, 40, 167 Manley, Edna, 25, 36n4 Manley, Michael, 27; popularity of, 33; socialist views of, 30, 37n20; Venezuelan oil deal of, 28; Williams and, 28, 38n28 Manley, Norman, 25, 189; legacy of, 25, 36n4; West Indies Federation and, 103; Williams and, 38n28 Manning, Patrick, in elections of 2001, 36n5 Maraj, Bhadase Sagan, 54 Marley, Bob, 38n29, 186 Marshall, T. H., 12 Martí, José, 3–4 Marx, Karl, 169. See also communism “Massa Day Done” (Williams), 34, 50, 121, 132–33, 189 Matthews, Basil, 49 Mbembe, Achille, 3 McAlmont, Cecilia, 15–16

McShine, Halsey, 56 Meeks, Brian, 9–10 Melucci, Alberto, 56 mercantilism, 175, 176 mestizos, 9, 17, 109, 112. See also mulattoes “Mighty Chalkdust” (calypsonian), 27–29 “Mighty Sparrow” (calypsonian), 26, 29, 37n11, 37n15, 186 Miller, Christine, 82, 95n3 Millette, James, 82–83, 86 Miskito Indians, 112 Mohammed, Oli, 128, 140 Mohammed, Patricia, 29 Moline, Edwin, 64–65 Mondesire, Sylvester, 133 Monroe Doctrine, 5 Montserrat, 107n21 Morris, Aldon, 56 Mosaheb, Ibbit, 56 Moyou, Soy Suilan, 118 Mugabe, Robert, 167 mulattoes, 113–16, 119, 121; mestizos and, 112 Naipaul, V. S., ix National Federation of Labour, 138 National Union of Domestic Employees, 143 National Union of Federated and Government Workers (NUFGW), 138, 142 National Union of Foods, Hotels, Beverages, and Allied Workers, 135 National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF), 9 National Union of Government Employees (NUGE), 135–36, 138 nationalism, multiethnic, 19, 120–21, 191 Negro in the Caribbean, The (Williams), 16–17, 31, 47; color stratification in, 109, 113–20; themes of, 50–51; West Indies Federation and, 98 Nehru, Jawaharlal, ix Nettleford, Rex, 6, 10–11, 14–15 Nicaragua, 112 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 168, 169

index

O’Halloran, John, 64, 142 oil industry of Trinidad and Tobago, 29, 37n20, 135, 142, 154–56; Black Power Movement and, 122–23, 136, 154; CARICOM and, 90–91; color stratification in, 119 Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU), 130–39, 142, 143 Oldenbrook, J. H., 128 Orebaugh, Walter, 63 Organization of American States (OAS), 86, 156 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 142 Osen, Neil, 109–10 Oxaal, Ivar, 39 Oxford University, 6, 44–47 Padmore, George, 131–32 Pakistan, 123 Palmer, Colin, 47–48, 128, 135, 190–91 Pan American Oil Company, 142 Panday, Basdeo, 139, 143, 145; in elections of 2001, 36n5; Workers and Farmers Party and, 132–33 PEM. See Political Education Movement People’s National Movement (PNM), 192; founding of, 7, 54; Home Rule Party and, 21n31; inclusiveness of, 32, 121, 191; labor unrest and, 132–46; objectives of, 55, 71n94, 149, 150; Political Education Movement and, 57; Public Service reform by, 149–58; women in, 57–58, 144 “People’s Parliament,” 56 People’s Progressive Party (PPP), 55, 139 phenotyping, 109, 111, 112, 117–18 picong, 28, 30 Pierre, Donald, 57 PNM. See People’s National Movement Political Education Group (PEG), 57, 67 Political Education Movement (PEM), 57, 59, 61 political opportunity structure (POS), 53–54, 67

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Pollard, Duke, 84–85 postcolonialism, 186–92; dependency theory and, 164; Farred on, 163–71; Gilbert and Tompkins on, 3–4, 8; Mbembe on, 3; post-colonialism versus, 4, 8, 12–13, 19; Scott on, 11–12 Powell, Colin L., viii, 28 Primus, Bernard, 135 Pringle, K., 116 Public Service reform, 18, 149–58; Civil Service Association and, 138, 158n1 Public Transport Service Corporation (PTSC), 133–34 Puerto Rico, 99, 106; color stratification in, 109, 115, 117, 119, 124n39 Queen’s Royal College (QRC), 41–43, 49 race. See color stratification radioactive waste, 64 Ramphal, Shridath, 83, 86 Ramsahai, E. R., 135 Rance, H. E., 70n57 Reddock, Rhoda, 58 reggae music, 38n29, 186 regional integration movement, 15–16, 77–94. See also West Indies Federation Reith, John, 25 resource mobilization theory, 15, 40, 66. See also social movement theories Rienzi, Adrian Cola, 129 Robinson, A. N. R., 64 Robinson, Arthur, 139 Robinson, Lisa Clayton, 7 Robnett, Belinda, 56 Rodney, Walter, 9, 92, 189–90 Rogers, De Wilton, 57–59, 70n72 Rohlehr, Gordon, 10, 14, 26 Rojas, John, 131, 137–38 Roodal, Timothy, 129 Rosemin, Carlton, 133 Ryan, Selwyn, 33, 137, 139, 145, 157

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Said, Edward, 13 Saint Kitts–Nevis, 107n21 Saint Lucia, 107n21, 116, 187 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 107n21, 113 Samaroo, Brinsley, viii–ix Sandiford, Erskine, 101 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 13, 14 Scott, David, 11 Sealy, Theodore, 33, 35, 38n28 Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union (SWWTU), 138, 140, 144 Shah, Raffique, 132–33, 139 Shaw, John, 53 silver standard, 178, 183 Simpson-Miller, Portia, 19n1 slave revolts, 5, 56, 116 slavery: abolition of, 5–6, 114, 123, 126, 172–75; Aristotle on, 49; concubinage and, 113–14, 116; economics of, 60–61. See also Capitalism and Slavery Smith, David, 25 Smith, Ferdinand, 54 Sobers, Garfield, 186 social movement theories, 15, 39–40, 47, 53–59, 66–67, 173 socialism, 51, 66, 191; in British Guiana, 54–55; in Jamaica, 30, 37n20, 54; James’s view of, 131; PNM and, 67, 131. See also communism Solomon, Patrick, 129 South African immigrants, 119 Sowell, Thomas, 121 Spencer, Clive, 133 St. Pierre, Maurice, 15 Stanford, Vas, 135–36 Steele, Shelby, 121 Strachan, Billy, 54 suffrage, 116, 187 sugar industry, 5, 61, 174–75, 179–80, 183– 84; Sephardic Jews in, 111; unionization

of, 128, 132, 138–39, 141–43, 145; Williams on, 37n20, 50–51, 59, 99, 106 Syrian immigrants, 5, 109, 115 Szacki, Jerzy, 49 Taft, Robert, 52 Tapia House Movement, 36n8, 139 Tarrow, Sidney, 53 Teachers’ Educational and Cultural Association (TECA), 56–59, 67 Teelucksingh, Jerome, 9, 17–18 Teshea, Isabel, 57, 65 Texaco Trinidad, 142 Thatcher, Margaret, 20n1 Thomas, Clive, 83, 91 Tomich, Dale, 18–19 Tompkins, Joanne, 3–4, 8, 11 Touré, Ahmed Sékou, 167 Toussaint Louverture, 163, 167, 170, 171 Tranquility Training School, 41–42, 45 Transport and Industrial Workers Union (TIWU), 133, 135–36 Trinidad and Tobago National Trades Union Congress (TTNUC), 137–38 Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), 129 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, 112 Tsoukalis, Loukas, 106 Tull, Carl, 142 Turkmenistan, 168 “unhomeliness,” 12 Union of Commercial and Industrial Workers (UCIW), 135–36 United Labour Front (ULF), 132–33, 138–39 United National Congress (UNC), 36n5 United States, 10; during Cold War, 130, 154, 168, 188, 191; cotton industry of, 174, 179– 84; invasion of Grenada by, 36n10; racial discrimination in, 117–18, 121, 124n39; slavery in, 174; University of the West Indies and, 65–66. See also Chaguaramas naval base

index

University of the West Indies (UWI), vii, 68, 105, 169; mission of, 38n30; plans for, 48, 49; US aid for, 65–66 Urquhart, Brian, 37n22 van der Mark, Abraham, 110, 111 Venezuela, 10, 28, 90–91; labor unrest in, 137 Walcott, Derek, 20n5, 30, 128 Washington, Booker T., 4, 20n7 Weber, Max, 157 Weekes, George, 131–33, 136–38, 141 West Indies Federation, 75–79, 93–94, 97– 106, 120; failure of, 79, 93, 101–6, 107n21, 164; flag of, 76; group photograph of, 98; Jamaica and, 32, 37n12, 80, 99–103, 106; James on, 103–4, 192; Lewis on, 103; proponents of, 97–100, 106; regional integration movement and, 15–16, 77–94. See also Caribbean Community Williams, Eric, vii–xi; autobiography of, 18, 41–43, 136, 149, 163–71; Burnham and, 15–16, 76–77, 93–94; on color stratification, 16–17, 109–23; doctoral thesis of, 6, 46; intellectual development of, 6, 15, 39–68; labor movement and, 126–46; legacy of, 14–15, 25–35, 163–71, 186–92; management style of, 145; photographs

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of, 24, 27, 28, 130; public service reform by, 18, 149–58; regional integration movement and, 75–94, 97–106 Works: British West Indian University, 48, 69n39; Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago, 134–35; Economics of Nationhood, 103; Education in the British West Indies, 48; From Columbus to Castro, 9, 30; History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 135; Inward Hunger, 18, 41–43, 136, 149, 163–71; “Massa Day Done,” 34, 50, 121, 132–33, 189; The Negro in the Caribbean, 16–17, 31, 47, 50–51, 98, 109, 113–20. See also Capitalism and Slavery Williams, Walter, 121 Williams Connell, Erica, 14, 25, 27, 36n4 Willys-Overland Motors Company, 52 Woodford Square, 55–56; photograph of, 31; Williams’s first lecture at, 50 Woodford Square, “University” of, 17, 29, 30; Hinds on, 190; naming of, 7, 56 Workers and Farmers Party (WFP), 132, 138 World Trade Organization (WTO), 37n22 Worrell, Sam, 140 Young, Joe, 132, 133 Zuma, Jacob, 167