Books by Eric Williams

'It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it' Sathnam Sanghera Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since.Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants accumulated vast fortunes and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work.

Eric Williams's influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944, was based on his previously unavailable dissertation, now in book form for the first time. The significant differences between his two seminal works allow us to reconsider questions whose importance has only increased in our current charged climate.

Traces Peter Howard, who was to become one of The Wooden Horse escapers, from his being shot down, through his capture, and first two POW camps. This work gets into the mind of a man determined to escape his captors. It shows that for all the many schemes dreamt up, very few ever got started and of those a 'home run' was like a lottery win.