Trinidad

A Plural Society

For almost 300 years following its “discovery,” Trinidad remained a colony of secondary importance in the Spanish Main. England's rise as a world power in the mid-18th century compelled the Spanish government to try to populate this formerly nearly deserted island. The Spanish developed an immigration policy that permitted non-Spaniards to settle in Trinidad as long as they professed Roman Catholicism. Trinidad became an ethnically diverse Catholic domain with French Creoles, natives of French colonies in the region, rather than Spaniards, as the absolute majority. After England conquered Trinidad in 1797, the French Creoles were more important economically and politically than was the Spanish government. Intra-elite ethnic conflict over cultural hegemony between the incoming colonizers (Anglican English) and the colonized colonizers (the pre-capitulation Catholics) marked 19th-century Trinidad.

Landowners' desperate efforts to secure a dependable and affordable source of agricultural laborers in the wake of full British West Indian slave emancipation in 1838 was particularly acute in Trinidad. The development of a plantation economy had just begun in earnest with the arrival of English settlers barely 40 years earlier. The owners of plantations first imported freed African laborers from nearby British possessions. These newly imported former slaves were generally English-speaking Protestants, whereas those already in Trinidad spoke a French-derived Creole and professed Roman Catholicism. Thus, the elite had become ethnically and culturally diverse as had the African descent population.

Trinidad also received immigrants from Portuguese-ruled Madeira and Cape Verde until the late 1850s. The number of Portuguese immigrants was much smaller compared with French-Creole and English settlers. However, their arrival had a notable impact on Trinidad's social structure because their distinct customs further differentiated it and because the Portuguese immigrants' status as contract workers stratified the island's “European” community. Because of their lack of experience in agricultural labor, along with the harsh treatment by the former slaveholders, Portuguese settlers recorded high mortality. The survivors shortly left the plantations for urban areas, where they became artisans, shopkeepers, and the like. Plantation owners needed yet another source of labor.