MIAMI – The Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture at Florida International University celebrates its 8th consecutive year on October 6, 2006.
This year’s lecture titled “ERIC WILLIAMS AND THE CONTINUING CHALLENGES OF A DIVERSE CARIBBEAN” will be delivered by Jamaica-born eminent historian, Dr. Colin Palmer, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University.
The lecture will take place at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, October 6, at the Wertheim Performing Arts Center, University Park, 11200 Southwest Eighth Street, Miami, Florida. Admission is free and open to the public.
The Eric Williams lecture was inaugurated in 1999 to honor the memory and legacy of Dr. Eric Williams, noted historian and Caribbean statesman; and to provide an intellectual forum for the examination of pertinent issues in Caribbean and African Diaspora history and politics.
Eric Williams was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1911, and attended Queen’s Royal College and Oxford University, where he received a doctorate in 1938. A consummate academic and historian, and author of several books, Dr. Williams is best known for his seminal work, the 62-year-old Capitalism and Slavery, which has been translated into eight languages, including Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Writing against the then popular grain of thought in the British imperial history, Williams argued that European slavery in the Caribbean was abolished for economic reasons rather than humanitarian practices. The book also made the powerful argument that slavery was at the very foundation of modernity and the rise of industrial Europe. Few modern historical works have enjoyed enduring intellectual impact and appeal as Capitalism and Slavery, causing the 1997 New York Times Book Review to term “The Williams Thesis” as remaining on the “cutting edge of slave trade research in academic circles.”
Eric Williams was not only an accomplished historian-scholar but also a brilliant politician-statesman and political theorist whose roving mind and prolific pen produced enduring writings on the politics and political economy of the Caribbean. His writings are path-breaking in our understanding of colonialism in the Caribbean and the developing world in general, and some of the challenges in building viable postcolonial states. As historians Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman observed in 1984 “Scholars may disagree on his ideas, but they remain the starting point of discussion” in the study of Caribbean history.
Dr. Williams led his country to Independence from Britain in 1962 and onto Republicanism in 1976, and was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and head of government for a quarter of a century until his death in 1981.
This year’s lecturer – Colin Palmer – is well versed in the history of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, and is also a leading scholar of Eric Williams’s intellectual life. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570 – 1650; Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700 – 1739; and Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America (2 vols). He is also the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of African American Life and Culture (6 vols.).
Colin Palmer’s latest book, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, is the first scholarly biography of Williams. Palmer’s vast and deep insights into Williams’s intellectual life help to illuminate the immense contribution of Eric Williams not only to the modern Caribbean’s historiography and politics but also to the history of the postcolonial Africana world in general. The book has been praised as a “Deeply researched, judicious, (and) eloquent… major achievement…, one fitting his brilliant and complex subject.” With this book, Dr. Palmer has established himself as the leading scholar of Eric Williams.
Dr. Palmer is a towering figure in the field of modern history. He has taught at Oakland University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as Chair of the Department of History and held the rank of William Rand Kenan Professor. He also taught at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and was named a Distinguished Professor. With extensive academic and public service, he combines the analytical depth of a distinguished historian with the vast breadth of a public intellectual. His contributions to the Caribbean history have earned him several fellowships and accolades. He has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Stanford Humanities Center. He is also the Managing Editor of the Schomburg project.
His lecture on “Eric Williams and the Continuing Challenges of a Diverse Caribbean” advances the Williams’s thesis on the significance of the Caribbean in the creation of the modern world, and Williams’s ideas on the development of postcolonial Caribbean. The lecture promises to be a fitting engagement with issues of current concern to Africana communities internationally.
Since 1998, FIU’s African New World Studies Distinguished Africana Scholars Lecture Series has organized the Eric E. Williams lecture in conjunction with the Eric Williams Memorial Collection at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago campus.
Our lecture is pleased to place Colin Palmer in a tradition of excellent lecturers who have graced the series since its inception: John Hope Franklin, premier African-American historian; Kenneth Kaunda, former President of the Republic of Zambia; Dr. Hillary Beckles, Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies; Hon. Cynthia Pratt, Deputy Prime Minister of the Bahamas; Hon. Mia Mottley, Attorney General of Barbados; Beverly Anderson-Manley, former First Lady of Jamaica; the celebrated civil rights activist Angela Davis; the prize-winning young Haitian author Edwige Danticat; and the renowned Trinidad calypsonian and scholar, Dr. Hollis Liverpool (Chalkdust).
The Eric Williams Memorial Lecture is now one of the most significant and anticipated intellectual events in South Florida. It was named to UNESCO’s prestigious Memory of the World Register in 1999, and has received several special commendations by political figures and social activists in the state of Florida.
Among the attendees expected at the lecture are members of the Caribbean diplomatic corp in South Florida, political figures in the state of Florida, and senior administrators of the Florida International University.
Books by Eric Williams and Colin Palmer will be available for purchase and signing at the Lecture.
