Williams, Eric (1911-1981), a Trinidadian scholar and statesman, was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. He held this position from his country’s independence in 1962 until his death on March 29, 1981.
Eric Eustace Williams was born in Trinidad on Sept. 25, 1911. At that time, Trinidad and Tobago was a British colony. Williams received his early education in Trinidad before winning a scholarship to Oxford University, England. At Oxford, he studied history and gained a first class honors degree. He also received a Ph.D. degree for a thesis dealing with economic aspects of the Caribbean slave trade.
Despite his academic contributions to the field of history, Williams was denied employment in the United Kingdom. In 1939, he moved to the United States, where he became professor of social and political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. While in the United States, Williams wrote his most famous work, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). He also was an important member of a multinational political community that included prominent leaders of black solidarity movements. Many of these leaders would go on to free their countries from colonial rule.
In 1948, Williams returned to Trinidad to work with the Caribbean Commission, an organization formed in 1942 to address social and economic issues in the Caribbean region. In 1956, the People’s National Movement (PNM) was officially launched with Williams as its political leader. The PNM won the general election that year. Williams became chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Three years later, in 1959, he became premier. In the elections of December 1961, the PNM won a landslide victory. When the colony became an independent republic in August 1962, Williams was elected prime minister. Williams’s later influential books include British Historians and the West Indies (1964) and From Columbus to Castro (1970).
