Eric Williams

He's using the moon as a pulpit.

Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Eric Williams wrote, "It's our earnest hope for mankind that while we gain the moon, we shall not lose the world."

That one's actually good.

It's very good.

I even think of New York as being another central place where Calypso, you know, starts evolving, especially with the migration of people.

I even, you know, would be remiss not to mention like a Harry Belafonte in the U.S. who also takes up these central roles Another thing that I was thinking through as you were talking about what came to mind is Mighty Sparrow's song, William the Conqueror, and how he uses that song to, in a sense, highlight a sort of pride for independence while also praising Eric Williams, in a sense as well.

And so there are all these sort of combinations.

The story is not linear.

Pregnant women would give birth to children down there.

The great Dr. Eric Williams, first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, in his book Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1943, said it was like the transportation of black cattle.

He said every person in the slave ship had less room than a man in a coffin.

And there we are, buried in our own waste.

Yeah.

But it is not because Eric Williams made this point or made these points in his book, Capitalism and Slavery in 1944.

Correct.

Tying British industrial and financial growth to Caribbean slavery.

He would've been their leader of the Labor Party.

The, the iconic Dr. Eric Williams, leader of the PNM-

Yeah

... head of the government in Trinidad and Tobago.

Uh, you know, Edmund's done brilliant work on this for the project, but also for the, for the book.

And You know, it dates from this, this really fascinating debate from, from the 1940s by the Trinidadian scholar and then politician Eric Williams, who made the point that, you know, some of the seed capital for the Industrial Revolution derived from the profits of, of, of the slave trade.

And, you know, I think we've supported that conclusion in various different ways.

You know, Williams' sort of anecdotal treatment of particular individuals supporting particular banks that supported investment in the Industrial Revolution.

so you're talking about 2007 1807 2007 and what was fascinating about that particular sort of bicentenary event was the fact that the churches were very keen to talk about the work that they did to end slavery.

So we were talking about abolitionists and you had evangelicals sort of talking about William Wilberforce, John Newton, the Clapham Sector, as Eric Williams pejoratively called them, the Clapham Saints.

And then you had the Quakers talking about the work that they did in terms of the abolition movement, particularly from 1785 struck 1787, individuals like Thomas Clarkson.

But what the churches didn't do or weren't so keen to talk about was how they colluded in this particular enterprise and provided the spiritual and all sometimes a moral justification for enslaving Africans.