Eric Williams - Scholarly Career

Scholarly Career

In Inward Hunger,eric recounts that in the period following his graduation: "I was severely handicapped in my research by my lack of money... I was turned down everywhere I tried ... and could not ignore the racial factor involved". However, in 1936, thanks to a recommendation made by Sir Alfred Claud Hollis (Governor of Trinidad and Tobago, 1930–36), the Leathersellers' Company awarded him a £50 grant to continue his advanced research in history at Oxford. He completed the D.Phil in 1938 under the supervision of Vincent Harlow. His doctoral thesis, The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery, was both a direct attack on the idea that moral and humanitarian motives were the key facts in the victory of British abolitionism, and a covert critique of the idea common in the 1930s, emanating in particular from the pen of Oxford Professor Reginald Coupland, that British imperialism was essentially propelled by humanitarian and benevolent impulses. Williams's argument owed much to the influence of C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins, also completed in 1938, also offered an economic and geostrategic explanation for the rise of British abolitionism.

Despite his extraordinary academic success at Oxford, Williams was denied the opportunity to pursue a career in the United Kingdom. In 1939 he moved to the United States to Howard University ("Negro Oxford", as he called it in his autobiography), where he was rapidly promoted twice, attaining full professorial rank. In Washington he completed the manuscript of his masterwork – Capitalism and Slavery – which was published by the University of North Carolina in 1944. This book assaulted many sacred cows of British imperial historiography, and it was not published in the United Kingdom until 1964, meeting with a critical reception.