[1] He has been described as the "Father of the Nation",[2][3][4][5][6] having led the then-British Colony of Trinidad and Tobago to majority rule on 28 October 1956, to independence on 31 August 1962, and republic status on 1 August 1976, leading an unbroken string of general elections victories with his political party, the People's National Movement, until his death in 1981.

Eliza's paternal grandfather was John Boissiere, a married upper-middle class Frenchman who had an intimate relationship with an African slave named Ma Zu Zule.

In Inward Hunger, his autobiography, he described his experience of studying at Oxford, including his frustrations with rampant racial discrimination at the institution, and his travels in Germany after the Nazis' seizure of power.

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 Oxford.

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.

[14] 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.

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 Jamaica Christmas Rebellion of 1831, to bring the end of Slavery in the 1830s.

In a speech at Woodford Square in Port of Spain, he declared that he had decided to "put down his bucket" in the land of his birth.

In the British West Indies, this goal coincided with the political aims of the nationalist movements which had emerged in all the colonies of the region during the 1930s.

The Montego Bay conference of 1948 had declared the common aim to be the achievement by the West Indies of "Dominion Status" (which meant constitutional independence from the British government) as a Federation.

Following the adoption of a resolution to that effect by the PNM General Council on 15 January 1962, Williams withdrew Trinidad and Tobago from the West Indies Federation.

In response to this, a portion of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force, led by Raffique Shah and Rex Lassalle, mutinied and took hostages at the army barracks at Teteron.

[21][22] After returning to Trinidad in 1948, he met Evelyn Siulan Soy Moyou, a typist 13 years his junior of Chinese descent on her father's side and Chinese, African, and Portuguese descent on her mother's side, and she was a niece of Solomon Hochoy, the future Governor and Governor-General of Trinidad and Tobago during Williams's premiership.

They began a relationship and he initiated divorce proceedings from Ribeiro in January 1950 on a Caribbean Commission trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

After dropping the proceedings, in a letter of April 1950 submitted to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia court, he agreed to abide by its decision and be bound by an order regarding alimony.

However, Ribeiro obtained an injunction preventing Williams from making any attempt at divorce, on the grounds that he had earlier subjected himself to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia court.

On 13 December 1950, Williams was ordered to appear in court, most likely because he had filed for a divorce in Reno, even though he had earlier submitted himself to the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia.

His lawyer in Reno pointed out that his divorce had been granted, though a search of the court records showed no entry for a final decree.

Williams eventually met the six-week residential requirement to obtain a Nevada divorce and on 2 January 1951, he married Moyou in Reno, in a ceremony performed by The Rev.

In his 1944 book, Capitalism and Slavery, Williams argued that the British government's passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 was motivated primarily by economic concerns rather than by humanitarian ones.

Williams also argued that by extension, so was the emancipation of the slaves and the blockade of Africa, and that as industrial capitalism and wage labour began to expand, eliminating the competition from wage-free slavery became economically advantageous.

In an open letter to Solow, Yale Professor of History David Brion Davis refers to Williams' thesis of the declining economic viability of slave labor as "undermined by a vast mountain of empirical evidence and has been repudiated by the world’s leading authorities on New World slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and the British abolition movement".

[27] A major work which was written to refute Eric Williams' thesis was Seymour Drescher's Econocide, which argued that when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, Britain's sugar economy was thriving.

Of particular significance are two published long after he had abandoned his academic career for public life: British Historians and the West Indies and From Columbus to Castro.

The former, based on research done in the 1940s and initially presented at a symposium at Clark Atlanta University, sought to challenge established British historiography on the West Indies.

The work appeared at the same time as a similarly titled book (De Cristóbal Colón a Fidel Castro) by another Caribbean scholar-statesman, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic.

"[31] The Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC) at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago was inaugurated in 1998 by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Secretary Powell heralded Williams as a tireless warrior in the battle against colonialism, and for his many other achievements as a scholar, politician and international statesman.

Photographs depicting various aspects of his life and contribution to the development of Trinidad and Tobago complete this extraordinarily rich archive, as does a three-dimensional re-creation of Williams' study.

Dr Colin Palmer, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, has said: "as a model for similar archival collections in the Caribbean...I remain very impressed by its breadth.... [It] is a national treasure."