Editing Eric Williams (section)

==Scholarly career==
In ''Inward Hunger'', Williams recounts that in the period following his graduation, He was "severely handicapped in my research by my lack of money{{nbsp}}... I was turned down everywhere I tried{{nbsp}}... and could not ignore the racial factor involved". However, in 1936, thanks to a recommendation made by Sir [[Alfred Claud Hollis]] (Governor of Trinidad and Tobago, 1930–36), the [[Leathersellers' Company]] awarded him a £50 grant to continue his advanced research in history at [[University of Oxford|Oxford]].<ref>The Leathersellers' Company Court Minutes, 1 July 1936, ref. GOV/1/25, pp. 136–37.</ref>

He completed the [[Doctor of Philosophy|D.Phil]] in 1938 under the supervision of [[Vincent Harlow]]. His doctoral thesis was titled ''The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery'', and was published as ''[[Capitalism and Slavery]]'' in 1944,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Neilson |first1=David |last2=Peters |first2=Michael A. |title=Capitalism's slavery |journal=Educational Philosophy and Theory |date=15 April 2020 |volume=52 |issue=5 |pages=475–484 |doi=10.1080/00131857.2019.1595323 |s2cid=150904617 |issn=0013-1857|doi-access=free}}</ref> although excerpts of his thesis were published in 1939 by ''[[The Keys (journal)|The Keys]]'', the journal of the [[League of Coloured Peoples]]. According to Williams, [[Fredric Warburg]] – a publisher of Marxist literature, who Williams asked to publish his thesis – refused to publish, saying that "such a book... would be contrary to the British tradition".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Levine |first1=Philippa |title=The British Empire: Critical Readings. Principles |date=2019 |publisher=Bloomsbury Academic |isbn=978-1-4742-6534-8 |page=269 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4ouCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA269}}</ref> His thesis was both a direct attack on the idea that moral and humanitarian motives were the key facts in the success of the [[Abolitionism in the United Kingdom|British abolitionist movement]], and a covert critique of the established British historiography on the [[West Indies]] (as exemplified by, in Williams' view, the works of [[University of Oxford|Oxford]] professor [[Reginald Coupland]]) as supportive of continued British colonial rule. Williams's argument owed much to the influence of [[C. L. R. James]], whose ''[[The Black Jacobins]]'', also completed in 1938, also offered an economic and geostrategic explanation for the rise of abolitionism in the Western world.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Getachew|first=Adom|title=Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination|date=2019|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-17915-5|pages=6|doi=10.2307/j.ctv3znwvg|jstor=j.ctv3znwvg|s2cid=242525007}}</ref>

Gad Heuman states:
:In ''Capitalism and Slavery,'' Eric Williams argued that the declining economies of the British West Indies led to the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. More recent research has rejected this conclusion; it is now clear that the colonies of the British Caribbean profited considerably during the [[French Revolutionary Wars|Revolutionary]] and [[Napoleonic Wars]].<ref>Gad Heuman, "The British West Indies" in Andrew Porter, ed., ''The Oxford History of the British Empire – Vol. 3: The 19th Century'' (1999), 3:470.</ref>

However, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' covers the economic history of sugar and slavery beyond just the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and discusses the decline of sugar plantations from 1823 until the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s. It also discusses the British government's use of the equalisation of the sugar duties Acts in the 1840s to sever their responsibilities to buy sugar from the British West Indian colonies, and to buy sugar on the open market from [[Captaincy General of Cuba|Cuba]] and [[Empire of Brazil|Brazil]], where it was cheaper.<ref>Eric Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964).</ref> In support of the Williams thesis, David Ryden presented evidence to show that by the early nineteenth century there was an emerging crisis of profitability.<ref>David Ryden, ''West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).</ref>

Williams's argument about abolitionism went far beyond this decline thesis. What he argued was that the new economic and social interest created in the 18th century by the slave-based Atlantic economy generated new pro-free trade and anti-slavery political interests. These interacted with the rise of evangelical antislavery and with the self-emancipation of slave rebels, from the Haitian Revolution of 1792–1804 to the [[Baptist War|Jamaica Christmas Rebellion]] of 1831, to bring the end of Slavery in the 1830s.<ref>Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery''.</ref>

In 1939, Williams joined the Political Science department at [[Howard University]].<ref name=":0" /> In 1943, Williams organized a conference about the "economic future of the Caribbean."<ref name=":02">{{Cite book|last=Getachew|first=Adom|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znwvg|title=Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination|date=2019|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-17915-5|pages=111|doi=10.2307/j.ctv3znwvg|jstor=j.ctv3znwvg|s2cid=242525007|access-date=25 April 2021|archive-date=20 September 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220920172205/https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znwvg|url-status=live}}</ref> He argued that small islands of the West Indies would be vulnerable to domination by the former colonial powers in the event that these islands became independent states; Williams advocated for a West Indian Federation as a solution to post-colonial dependence.<ref name=":02" />