Historic Eric Williams book republished

The re-launch event is set for 6.30 pm on Friday June 23, 2006 at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, #1 University Plaza, HS 107, Brooklyn, NY and is being presented under the auspices of the entire Caribbean Consular Corps in New York.

Guests will include Ambassador Michael King of Barbados, Professor Tony Martin of Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and Erica Williams–Connell, daughter of the late PM and noted historian. The book comprises the proceedings of a conference of the same name organised by Williams, then a 31-year-old assistant professor of political and social science at Howard University.

The conference had featured eclectic an influential group of experts on the Caribbean, including advocates of independence for Puerto Rico, leaders of the pro-democracy movement among Caribbean Americans, scholars, diplomats and the top brass of the British and United States sections of the newly-formed Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, who debated the conference theme. Participants discussed the dominance of sugar throughout the region, the need for agricultural diversification, the fisheries industry and the media. They also examined race relations, the future of colonialism and the prospects for Caribbean Federation.

The book is being reprinted by the Majority Press with the cooperation of The Eric Williams Memorial Collection at The University of the West Indies. New additions include a foreword by Williams–Connell and a fresh introduction by Tony Martin, Professor of Africana Studies. Eric Williams was awarded a Trinidad and Tobago Island Scholarship, graduated at the top of his undergraduate class at Oxford University and obtained a PhD from Oxford in 1938.

He was successively the first chief minister, premier and prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 until his death in 1981. In academic circles, he is best known as the author of Capitalism and Slavery, translated into eight languages– Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and this year Korean among them.

E Franklin Frazier was chairman of Howard University’s Division of Social Sciences, which sponsored Williams’ 1943 conference. His several books include Black Bourgeoisie and The Negro Family in the United States.