Palmer provides a fascinating study of one of the most brilliant and controversial figures of the twentieth century Caribbean: Eric Williams, the scholar-politician who dominated political life in Trinidad and Tobago for more than twenty-five years. This is not a conventional biography (readers searching for the more intimate details of Williams' life can turn instead to Ken Boodhoo's The Elusive Eric Williams, 2002), nor is it a conventional political history of Trinidad and Tobago in the period of Williams' premiership (from 1956 to his death in 1981). Rather, the book offers a close and detailed analysis of Williams' role in Caribbean politics from his inauguration as chief minister in 1956 to the ‘watershed’ events of 1970: the Black Power-influenced demonstrations that constituted the first and most serious ‘extralegal challenge’ to Williams' rule (p. 302).

By focusing on this period Palmer gives us Williams at the apex of his political career, avoiding thus the difficult period of the 1970s, Williams' much noted retreat into ‘paranoia’, and unflattering appraisals of his record after twenty-five years in power. In this sense, the book rehabilitates Williams from the depredations of post-nationalist histories that have been highly critical of his domestic legacies and achievements. While Palmer's treatment of Williams is even-handed (he does not shrink from his failures, nor from the less appealing aspects of his personality), it is impossible not to admire the Williams who emerges from the pages of this book. This is Williams at ‘the peak of his vitality’ (p. 304): the brilliant scholar; the ‘ardent foe of colonialism’ (p. 12); the committed advocate of Caribbean integration; and above all, the man who consistently and unflinchingly defended the rights of colonised peoples ‘to be heard in their own cause’ (p. 106).

Williams' anti-colonialism is a central theme of the book. Chapter one focuses on Williams' conviction that decolonisation was as much an intellectual as an economic and political process. This conviction informed not only his work as a historian (his still controversial Capitalism and Slavery forcefully overturned the ‘lies of history’ (p. 18) perpetuated in metropolitan scholarship), but also his policies on education, and the extraordinary political theatre upon which he built Trinidad's nationalist movement: the great public lectures at the ‘University of Woodford Square’. Williams' determination that colonised peoples should ‘write their own history’ (p. 136) is explored throughout the book in an analysis of key episodes in Trinidadian and wider Caribbean history. Chapter three, for example, gives a detailed account of Williams' battle over the US naval station at Chaguaramas, a ‘David and Goliath-like conflict’ that gave Williams ‘the greatest victory of his political career’ (p. 137). Here, and in chapter four, where Palmer analyses Williams' initial rejection of Britain's so-called ‘golden handshake’, there emerges a portrait of a man engaged in perpetual battle with the emissaries of imperial officialdom, often in the face of substantial opposition at home and abroad. As Palmer shows, British and American relations with Williams were often coloured by prejudice and assumptions of superiority. In this context, Williams' notorious abrasiveness, his intransigence, his refusal to play the role of the accommodating diplomat, were more than the idiosyncrasies of a ‘difficult’ man (p. 152). They were the expression of his determination to be treated as an equal in the face of considerable prejudice and vastly iniquitous distributions of power. Likewise, the conflicts over Chaguaramas or the golden handshake were about more than the immediate issues at hand: they were larger symbolic struggles – ‘fought in the name of all colonized peoples’ (p. 178) – for their right to negotiate their own fate, to reclaim their identity, their soil and self-respect (p. 94).

The second broad theme of the book is Williams' engagement with the wider Caribbean. The chapters examining the West Indies Federation, Chaguaramas, Grenada, and British Guiana all illustrate different dimensions of Williams' strongly regionalist vision of the area's political and economic future. In each case, Palmer shows how this Pan-Caribbean vision was consistently fractured by island nationalisms, leadership conflicts, external pressures and the imperatives of domestic politics. Palmer does not obscure Williams' own part in these divisions (showing, for example, how his efforts to mediate in the conflict in British Guiana were compromised by his antipathy to Cheddi Jagan), nor does he ascribe wholly idealist motivations to his efforts for regional unity. ‘[E]nlightened self-interest’ (p. 234), vanity, the desire for a larger stage on which to showcase his talents, all play a part. This is as much, then, a book about compromises, failures and the pressures of realpolitik as it is about political aspirations and ideals. These ‘tensions between political ideology and the realities of government’, Palmer suggests, were ‘never resolved’ (p. 38).

The broad canvas of the book on the whole serves Williams well. The focus on the wider Caribbean and, in chapter seven, on Africa, suspends the analysis of Williams' post-independence domestic record until the final chapter. Centering his analysis on the ‘economics and politics of race’ Palmer highlights the tensions between the ‘non-racial nationalism’ of the People's National Movement and the predominantly Afro-Trinidadian demographics of their support base (pp. 263–5). It was when a section of that support turned against him that Williams faced his greatest ‘personal and political crisis’ (p. 14), the ‘Black Power’ rebellion of 1970, with which the book closes. Palmer's account throws up some fascinating insights into Williams' state of mind at the height of the crisis, but more interesting is his argument that the rebellion was as much a consequence of Williams' successes as it was of his failures. Who else but Williams had generated such ‘enormous expectations’ for independent Trinidad, unleashed a nation's political consciousness, and taught its citizenry to believe that the ‘Massa day dead’ (pp. 284–5). Williams' youthful detractors, Palmer argues, were themselves his ‘intellectual children’, the product of his policies of mass political education. The rebellion, hence, was a ‘case of attempted patricide’ (p. 307).

The image of patricide reminds us that this is a book about a single and dominating personality. As such it fits within a long-standing tradition of interpreting Caribbean history through the impact of its charismatic leaders. Palmer makes a convincing defence of the need to comprehend Williams' character (showing, for example, how obsessively it was interpreted by colonial officials and how these interpretations directly affected British policy), but this is, nevertheless, a perspective which inevitably consigns other personalities and other perspectives – Williams' cabinet members, the ordinary masses who supported him – to the position of ‘subdued and silent spectators’ (p. 155). Palmer's work is a magnificent testimony to the sheer force of that singular personality, and the extent of his impact on politics in the modern Caribbean. Williams' continued capacity to impose himself on history is not in doubt.