Two labour systems, back to back
Spain held Trinidad for three centuries but barely settled it; Britain took it in 1797, and Tobago separately, uniting the two in 1889. The plantation economy ran on enslaved Africans until abolition in 1834 and the end of "apprenticeship" in 1838.
What made Trinidad distinctive was what came next. To replace the labour the freed refused to give on plantation terms, Britain brought indentured workers from India — some 143,000 between 1845 and 1917. Their descendants are today roughly as numerous as the Afro-Trinidadian population, making Trinidad and Tobago one of the few societies in the Americas where the African and Indian diasporas meet in near-equal number. Diwali and Hosay are marked alongside Carnival; the food, the music and the politics all carry both inheritances.
Carnival, and the fight over it
Carnival came with the French Catholic planters as a pre-Lenten masquerade for the white elite. After emancipation the freed took it over and remade it — with Canboulay, the torch-lit procession that reenacted the burning cane-fields, at its centre. The British tried to suppress it; the Canboulay Riots of 1881 were a direct fight over the right to the streets, and Carnival survived as a genuinely popular festival rather than an elite one.
Out of Carnival came calypso — topical, satirical song that served as the people's newspaper, and that the authorities repeatedly tried to censor. And out of the same yards came the steelpan: built in the 1930s and 1940s from discarded oil drums, after skins and bamboo had both been banned, it is one of the very few acoustic instruments invented in the twentieth century, and it was invented by the poorest people on the island.
The thinkers
For its size, Trinidad produced an extraordinary run of Black intellectuals. C. L. R. James wrote "The Black Jacobins", the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, and shaped Pan-Africanism and Marxist thought across three continents. Eric Williams, a historian whose "Capitalism and Slavery" argued that the profits of the slave trade helped fund Britain's industrial revolution, became the country's first prime minister and led it to independence in 1962. George Padmore, a key organiser of Pan-Africanism who advised Nkrumah in Ghana, was also Trinidadian.
The line from these men runs directly into Accra: the Pan-African movement that helped free West Africa was in large part a Caribbean invention, and Trinidad supplied more than its share of the inventors. It was no accident that so much of that thought was worked out abroad — in London boarding houses and American universities — by men the colony had educated and then had little use for at home.
Oil, independence and after
Trinidad had something most Caribbean islands did not: oil and gas, which have made it one of the wealthier and more industrial nations of the region, and also tied it to the fortunes of a volatile commodity. Independence came in 1962 and a republic in 1976. Politics has often run along the African-Indian line the plantation created, though the culture crosses it constantly.
Soca grew out of calypso; the steelbands became national institutions; and Carnival became an export, copied from Notting Hill to Brooklyn to Toronto. A small republic, it exports celebration and ideas in roughly equal measure.