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  • Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean
  • Paul Buhle
Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. By Colin A. Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 354. Illustration. Tables. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 cloth.

This is the first nearly full biographical treatment of Eric Williams, the grand English-language historian of the Caribbean and the father (if there can be said to be a father) of the independent Trinidad-Tobago nation. It is based on a careful reading [End Page 488] of primary sources, especially the collection of Williams' personal papers archived in large part by Erica Williams Connell. Whatever may be the critical judgment of this volume in other terms, it will be regarded as a foundation stone for future work on the Caribbean political and intellectual giant. It is, however, an extremely cautious work, perhaps properly described as an authorized biography with the limitations customary to the task. The author has little on Williams' life before his college years and has chosen to close off his subject at 1970. That is to say, he ends before the crushing realization by many islanders that neocolonialism under the American flag was every bit as fierce as the original British variety, and that the great opportunity to unite the islands' East Indians with its Afro-Caribbeans had been squandered.

Palmer is a fine scholar and he treats the rise of Williams to magnum intellect and polemicist with care. Williams' insightful contemporaries might have observed about this volume what they observed about "the Doctor" in life, that the contradictions within him had evidently set in early and become increasingly severe toward the end. Ordinary Trinidadians by the thousands thought of him as the second smartest man on earth, just after Einstein, which is to say, the smartest person of color anywhere. Williams himself had no doubt about his intelligence (or ability for hard work) but seemed to experience from early on a certain class and race anxiety typical of what some have identified as "the brown people of the cities" across the Third World taking power through their education and then holding the masses in check. He drove himself to succeed and to lead the masses, but he was definitely not one of them, neither in lifestyle nor in aspiration. He was a loner despite his many social contacts and devotees, and it would seem that he suffered terribly from this reality.

Thus the paradox of Williams and his acknowledged mentor, C.L.R. James. From the days when the future leader was in short pants, James set out to train and prepare him. What was true of his budding scholarship was even truer of his political development, up to a point. Williams, as James understood best, moved politically in response to his constituency, for whom the "University of Woodford Square" (i.e., Williams' outdoor oratory) was the training ground of militant nationalism. Here, among the public, Williams showed himself more than brilliant. He had the makings of intellectual leadership amongst the non-white world emerging from colonialism.

The consequent pathos and drama seem to get lost in the details of this volume. To say that Williams was brought back to a relative conservatism by his instinctive anti-communism is not nearly enough, because he arranged (or allowed) for James, the arch anti-Stalinist, to be driven out of the editorship of the Independence party paper in 1960, after having called James back to the island for that key purpose. Yesterday's militant cadre swiftly became today's timeserving functionaries. The dream of Federation, the one opportunity to recall the region from a century of economic decline, fell apart over competing nationalisms. Worse for his own islands, Williams had begun to play the race card, his shrewd but debilitating response to the radical threat of Black Power posed by students and workers alike. Doing so bought him [End Page 489] political time, but left the best of his efforts in ruins. This is not to dispute the accomplishments of Williams that Selwyn Cudjoe pointed to in his luminous Eric E. Williams Speaks (1993) and other writings. It does suggest that...

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