Empire because it was really

good.

Eric Williams, so born in Trinidad in 1911, a middle-class kid in Trinidad, gets a scholarship to Oxford, does a degree in economics, plays rugby for Oxford, gets a first and then cannot get funding pretty obviously for racist reasons, to do his defil, which he wanted to do and eventually did do on the history of enslavement, which then was a nasty little story in British history, but we got over it and we abolished it and we're the good guys.

And he wrote a fantastic book, which was finally published in 1948, called Capitalism and Slavery, in which he made two key points, which were that The proceeds from slavery had funded the Industrial Revolution and thus modern Britain.

And also that Britain had not abolished slavery because of moral goodness, but for economic reasons as well, because it was becoming unsustainable, supporting the Caribbean economies.

And this book, in print forever, everywhere except Britain.

because British historians have damned it, I think, again, on really quite racist grounds.

Spot on.

And he went

over to Tobago, decided that, talked to locals, there was another Ferguson, different family already on the island, looked after him and...

this is raw jungle, decided it should be cotton and indigo.

It's not suitable for sugar.

And he went to the market in Scarborough and Tobago and bought seven people he described as Igbos, which is a West African tribe.

This is his initial purchase, borrowed money to do it, wrote back to his brothers and set sail in a little boat around the island to land on the beach and alongside them start clearing the raw jungle.

It's kind of an amazing scene.

Can you tell us a bit about the Rizal plantations?

So maybe you could speak to that.

No, absolutely.

I mean, so, you know, it's been a learning process for me.

I mean, I was, along with many of my schoolmates, sexually abused by a teacher in a small, posh private boarding school, you know, 8-13 in Sussex in the 1970s.

And what I took from that was...

You know, I disclosed.

I mean, I told my mom and my mom went to the school and they shut her up and so on.

And she said that in the end, what she understood was her mother looked the other way because it took the sexual pressure off her mother.