Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean

Eric Williams dominated Trinidad’s politics from 1956 to 1981. Palmer’s important study is the third book made possible by the opening of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC) in Trinidad. Ken Boodhoo’s The Elusive Eric Williams (2002) essayed a biography. The re-publication of The Economic Future of the Caribbean (2004), edited by Williams and E. Franklin Frazier (1944), carried a new introduction on Williams in the 1940s. Palmer now brings new Williams scholarship up to 1970.Palmer considers this a political and intellectual history. He selects several pivotal episodes to elucidate Williams’s influence on Caribbean politics. He examines the well-chosen topics of Williams’s intellectual anticolonialism, his advocacy of regional integration, his conflict with the United States over the return of the Chaguaramas naval base, his fight with Great Britain over its parting “golden handshake,” his efforts to entice Grenada into a unitary state, attempts to mediate Guyana’s racial problems, his attitude to Africa, and his handling of the Trinidad race question.Among the strengths of the book are its review of the history of federation, Wil-liams’s campaign for Chaguaramas, and the background to Williams’s understanding of colonialism. Palmer brilliantly catches former Williams minister and defector Winston Mahabir lying in his political memoir. Palmer also provides startling evidence, though he does not highlight it, of the massive involvement of the United States and Britain in Trinidad’s political life. Everybody — Prime Minister Eric Williams, his ministers, opposition leaders, businessmen, a former chief justice — reported to the American and British representatives, divulging plans and telling tales on one another. Governor-General Sir Solomon Hochoy told a British representative that Williams was an irrational “madman.” The resulting diplomatic dispatches evinced scorn, condescension, or hard-nosed evaluations of who could be taken seriously.Palmer’s study “is based almost entirely on manuscript sources” in the EWMC, London’s Public Record Office, and the U.S. National Archives (p. 335). He does not explore the newspapers and magazines of the region. He further “avoid[s] interviews with Williams’ contemporaries” since such “highly partisan accounts” would have made his “search for the proverbial ‘truth’ . . . much more difficult (p. 13).” The historian’s obligation to read everything, interview everybody, and then make informed assessments of credibility is trumped by his a priori exclusions. Palmer relies on the subjective dispatches of British and U.S. diplomats for nearly everything — basic accounts of events, perspectives, evaluations of Williams’s character, and insights into big power operations. Sometimes he criticizes them, but they are still his major source. The result is a book that is full of such important new information as these sources can provide, but which still cries out for the benefits of fuller research.This overwhelming reliance on dispatches also proves the book’s weaknesses. There is a sense of unfamiliarity with the Trinidad context that dispatches alone cannot remedy. The results are several errors of both commission and omission. Palmer is totally unaware (pp. 10, 264) of the Hindu People’s Democratic Party (PDP), runner-up to Williams’s Peoples National Movement (PNM) in 1956. He seems unaware of the precise nature of the “constitutional issues” (p. 10) by which British officialdom actually helped Williams to secure power. He almost totally misses the firestorm caused in Sierra Leone by Williams’s assertion there (as elsewhere) that Trinidad was not an African country. He seems unaware that Williams topped the popular vote despite losing the federal elections of 1958.Palmer is generally favorable toward Williams. He nevertheless asserts (p. 11) that Williams was incapable of handling dissent. Williams’s PNM was actually a democratic party in which members exerted influence. Palmer claims (p. 25) that Williams’s “chronic intellectual arrogance would not have permitted him to identify any ideological god fathers.” To the contrary, Alain Locke, C. L. R. James, and doctoral advisor Vincent Harlow are among those Williams acknowledged. Palmer tries “an informed but risky assessment of [Williams’s] persona” (p. 151) and its effect on policy. Here he relies mainly on a British high commissioner’s attempts at amateur psychoanalysis and on Williams’s reminiscences of his childhood. His “merely speculative” (p. 160) conclusion is that Wil-liams expected uncritical allegiance because of his childhood authority over his siblings.Palmer’s severest assault on Williams comes over Williams’s 1958 description of Hindu Trinidad as a “recalcitrant and hostile minority of the West Indian nation masquerading as ‘the Indian nation’ and prostituting the name of India for its selfish, reactionary political ends” (p. 266). Palmer denounces this as “harsh and intemperate” but makes no effort to evaluate the extensive justification that Williams provided for the statement, and which Palmer faithfully records. He himself provides copious evidence tending to support Williams’s contention.The book is generally well documented, but references occasionally disappear at crucial moments, such as the recall (p. 116) of a U.S. representative who advocated Williams’s overthrow and his replacement by “more rational elements” (p. 114). Palmer ends with the 1969 – 70 Black Power agitation, told practically entirely from U.S. and British dispatches. The result is that huge portions of the story (early marches, Country Club affair, the 1967 ban on Stokely Carmichael, government reaction to Black Power events in Canada, leadership of the army mutiny, etc.) go unmentioned.The book might best be seen as “Eric Williams: The View from London and Washington.” In this sense it is a highly successful addition to our knowledge of a major figure

Biography · Colonialism · Memoir · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law