published on February 11, 2025

An Audacious Review: Unpacking Elsa Goveia¡¯s Critique of Eric Williams

Taking a critical book review of Eric Williams¡¯s 1964 survey of British West Indian historiography, British Historians and the West Indies, as its point of analysis, this article looks at how the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia pushed back against Williams¡¯s vision for the orientation of West Indian Studies in an age of independence. It suggests that Goveia¡¯s review symbolizes the transition of West Indian scholarship from the anti-colonial period, represented by Williams the individual, to the post-colonial period, represented by a new generation of scholars who were based at the University of the West Indies. While Williams had led scholarship on the West Indies in the decades leading up to independence, he was ill-suited to the field¡¯s collaborative nature thereafter and had become a distraction to its growth. Crucial to this argument is an analysis of gender and ego. While Williams¡¯s chauvinism and egoism had helped him succeed in the highly performative and masculine realms of the early-twentieth-century Academy and politics, an analysis of Goveia¡¯s review suggests that they hindered his development as a scholar and colleague in later years.