Eric Williams dominated Trinidad’s politics from 1956 to 1981. Palmer’s important study is the third book made possible by the opening of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC) in Trinidad. Ken Boodhoo’s The Elusive Eric Williams (2002) essayed a biography. The re-publication of The Economic Future of the Caribbean (2004), edited by Williams and E. Franklin Frazier (1944), carried a new introduction on Williams in the 1940s. Palmer now brings new Williams scholarship up to 1970.
Palmer considers this a political and intellectual history. He selects several pivotal episodes to elucidate Williams’s influence on Caribbean politics. He examines the well-chosen topics of Williams’s intellectual anticolonialism, his advocacy of regional integration, his conflict with the United States over the return of the Chaguaramas naval base, his fight with Great Britain over its parting “golden handshake,” his efforts to entice Grenada into a unitary state, attempts to mediate Guyana’s racial problems, his...
