Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery

Eric Williams was the most prominent intellectual from the English-speaking Caribbean in the twentieth century. He was a leader of West Indian independence and the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1955 to 1981. Dale W. Tomich is professor emeritus of sociology and history at Binghamton University, State University of New York. William Darity Jr. is Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University.

The fact that Williams’s previously hard to access doctoral thesis is now available to the general public will help to clarify important aspects of the ‘Williams Thesis’ and its genesis. . . . The route from dissertation to final text runs parallel to Williams’s trajectory from a young black student combating racism and imperial narratives at Oxford to the future prime minister of an independent nation. Apart from being an important historiographical document, Williams’s dissertation is therefore also a historical source in its own right. . . . [R]econsidering the ‘making of’ the Williams Thesis can have a profound impact on how we view its later interpretations and current relevance. . . . The Economic Aspect provides important insights into the genealogy of the Williams Thesis that are much harder to grasp from the more polemical, and more layered text of Capitalism and Slavery. . . . The publication of The Economic Aspect finally makes it possible for a wider audience to retrace Williams’s steps. In the process, we can start to disentangle Williams’s complicated relationship to the Oxford imperial historians, radical predecessors and contemporaries, and the emerging anti-colonial struggles of his day.

• PrefaceDale TomichIntroduction: From the Dissertation to Capitalism and Slavery: Did Williams's Abolition Thesis Change?William Darity Jr.The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and SlaveryEric WilliamsIntroductionPart IChapter 1: The Impolicy of the Slave SystemChapter 2: The Superiority of the French West IndiesChapter 3: East India SugarChapter 4: The Attempt to Secure an International AbolitionChapter 5: The West Indian ExpeditionsChapter 6: The Significance of the West Indian ExpeditionsChapter 7: The Abolition of the Slave TradePart IIChapter 8: The Abolitionists and EmancipationChapter 9: The Foreign Slave TradeChapter 10: East India SugarChapter 11: The Distressed AreasChapter 12: The Industrialists and EmancipationEpilogueAppendix I: "The Influential Men"Appendix II: Ramsay as an AuthorityAppendix III: The Intercolonial Slave TradeBibliography