Eric Williams (1911-1981) is one of the main intellectual and political figures of the Caribbean emancipation movements. Research and militancy run couples in his biography. During a good part of the thirties and forty he studied in Oxford and the Howard University in Washington, the black university par excellence of the US. In 1944 he finally published the product of more than ten years of study: capitalism and slavery. Subsequently he returned to the British Antilles, in order to encourage the political movements of what would end up being the independent state of Trinidad and Tobago. He was Prime Minister of that country between 1956 and the date of his death.