Dear Editor,

I wish to refer to the letter by Kassa Barnett captioned “Eric Williams did not get the idea for capitalism and slavery from CLR James” (07.11.16) which was in response to that by Abu Bakr on November 7, 2007. In this letter, the writer states in the second paragraph: “Eric Williams did not owe the idea of his book Capitalism and Slavery to CLR James.”

Abu Bakr is correct. On page 62 of his biography of Eric Williams titled The Elusive Eric Williams Professor Ken Boodhoo confirms Bakr’s claim. He argued that in the bibliography of the revised edition of Capitalism and Slavery, Williams mentioned two sources for his book: the first was a Master’s thesis and the “second and more important is CLR James’s The Black Jacobins