“Vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians”
Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism
In the summer of 1935, as Keynes was revising the final manuscript of The General Theory in Cambridge, a twenty-three-year-old Trinidadian named Eric Williams sat for his final examinations in modern history at England’s other ancient university, Oxford. Three years earlier Williams had received Trinidad’s Island Scholarship, the highest academic honor that a high school student could attain on the small British colony located in the southern Caribbean, close to Venezuela. Despite the social, racial, and geographic gulfs that separated Oxford from Trinidad, Williams had settled in, doing well academically and playing cricket for the university. His tutor at St. Catherine’s College, R. Trevor Davies, a Welsh clergyman who was an expert on Imperial Spain, served as his mentor and friend. Still, taking finals in Oxford is a grueling challenge for anyone, and Williams’s ordeal was extended when, after completing his written papers, he was summoned to an additional verbal examination, known as a “viva voce.” When he arrived to meet the examiners he got a pleasant surprise. Rather than grilling him on his written answers, the chief examiner informed him that he had achieved a distinguished first-class degree and inquired about his interest in colonial history, which he had chosen as his elective. “Well, I am a colonial,” Williams replied. The examiner asked if he meant that there was a connection between a scholar’s own environment and their studies, to which Williams replied that he didn’t see the value of study unless such a connection existed. The examiner “then congratulated me on my excellent performance in the examination,” Williams recounted later in his life, “commented on the regularity of my handwriting and the speed with which I could obviously write, and wished me success in my future career.”1
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