Eric Williams and Abolition: The Birth of a New Orthodoxy

Summary

When, on August 1, 1984, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham told a rally of 5,000 people in Georgetown, Guyana, that Britain did not abolish slavery in 1834 for humanitarian reasons but because the system had become “unprofitable, risky and expensive” it is unlikely that it came as news to most members of his audience. Certainly no surprise was registered when Mrs. Marilyn Gordon, Minister of Sports, Culture, and Youth Affairs, addressed similar remarks to a gathering at the Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad, two days earlier. However revolutionary such comments may have seemed in Oxford, or indeed elsewhere, in the 1930's or 1940's, they were, so Elsa Goveia tells us, “already orthodox at the UCWI in the 1950's” and were penetrating large numbers of schools all over the West Indies.

Professor Goveia was, of course, referring specifically to the views of Eric Williams. As a politician, Williams, one suspects, would not have been displeased at the frequency with which his ideas were cited in connection with the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, although whether, as a scholar, he would have approved of all that was said in this regard we can be less sure.