80 years ago, Eric Williams left Oxford in anger and frustration. For while ranked first in the First Class as an undergraduate, and with a 1938 doctorate, no college in interwar Oxford elected Black men to their fellowships. In 1944, he published “Capitalism and Slavery” in the United States. For decades in Oxford it was a book dismissed or ignored. But 75 years later it is key to a range of influential arguments about the role of Slavery in the making of the modern world, and about the origins of abolition in economic change and slave rebellion. What can we understand about twentieth-century Oxford by thinking about the fate of Williams and the claims and trajectory of his book? And how can we use Williams, in particular in the light of the UCL Legacies of Slave Ownership project, to understand how Caribbean slavery enriched Oxford?

Drinks will be served following the lecture.

All welcome.