Trinidad and Tobago

Its history is unusual in the Caribbean in three respects. Trinidad spent three centuries as a Spanish colony but was settled mainly by French planters and their slaves, then taken by Britain in 1797 and governed as a Crown colony, with no elected members in its legislature until 1925. Because there was no planters' parliament to entrench a local oligarchy, the colonial state remained unusually direct: governors ruled by ordinance, and after 1838 the plantation economy was rebuilt with indentured labour from India rather than with the freed African population. The result was a society with two large ethnic blocs of roughly equal size, no dominant creole elite of the Barbadian or Jamaican kind, and a state that became the principal arena of ethnic competition.

Oil then changed the arithmetic. Commercial production began before the First World War, and by the 1970s the revenue from it was funding a welfare state, a free education system, a road network and a subsidy habit that outlived the oil. When oil prices collapsed in the 1980s the state kept spending; when gas took over in the 1990s it borrowed against that instead. Trinidad and Tobago is now a high-income country by World Bank classification and has stagnated for a decade, which is the central puzzle of its modern politics.

It also matters out of proportion to its size. Carnival, calypso, soca and the steelpan were all made here, and so were V. S. Naipaul and Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery reframed the history of the British Empire. The country has one of the oldest continuous parliamentary traditions in the tropical Commonwealth, has changed governing party at the ballot box seven times since 1956, and has also survived an armed coup attempt, four states of emergency since 2011 and a murder rate that is among the highest in the western hemisphere.

At a glance

What did Spain actually govern?

Columbus sighted Trinidad at noon on 31 July 1498, named it for the Trinity, and sailed into the Gulf of Paria through the channel he called the Serpent's Mouth. He did not land on Tobago, which he named Belaforme because it looked beautiful from the sea. The Spanish Empire's claim was instant; its government was not. The first attempt at settlement, by Antonio Sedeño in 1532, was driven off by the island's people at Cumucurapo, and a second attempt a year later survived only until Sedeño's men deserted him for Peru. The first lasting town, San José de Oruña, was founded by Antonio de Berrío in 1592, and Walter Raleigh sacked it three years later while looking for El Dorado, carrying Berrío off to interrogate him about the gold of Guiana.

What Spain ran in Trinidad was a frontier rather than a colony. The island's population was distributed among encomiendas, grants of indigenous labour, and then gathered into mission villages run by Capuchin friars after 1687. The missions were not benign: the Arena massacre of 1699, in which the people of the mission villages killed several priests, was followed by reprisals that drove survivors to jump from the cliffs. By 1777 the island held 2,763 people, more than 2,000 of them indigenous, and its capital consisted of mud huts with thatch roofs. There was no gold, almost no defence and little trade except what the settlers conducted illegally with Dutch, English and French ships.

Two things kept Trinidad Spanish for so long. It was poor enough not to be worth the expense of conquest, and it was close enough to the mainland to be administered from Caracas, which after 1777 had its own captaincy-general. Dutch raids, British raids and the depredations of privateers were absorbed. When the British finally came in 1797 the island had no fortifications worth the name, and the governor's military position was hopeless before a shot was fired.

Why did a French colony grow inside a Spanish one?

The transformation came from a bureaucratic decision. In 1776 a French creole official from Martinique, Roume de Saint-Laurent, proposed to the Spanish court that Trinidad be opened to Catholic settlers from the French islands, and on 20 November 1783 Charles III issued a cedula de población that did exactly that. White settlers received roughly 32 acres each and half as much again for every slave they brought; free people of colour received half the white allocation, with the same bonus for slaves. Settlers were exempted from tithes and export duties for ten years and became naturalised subjects after five.

The terms were generous because Spain wanted a sugar colony without paying for one, and they worked faster than anyone expected. The French Revolution and the British conquest of the French islands pushed planters out of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada, Dominica and Saint-Domingue, and many of them moved to Trinidad with their slaves, their language and their revolutionary politics. Between 1777 and 1797 the population rose from 2,763 to 17,643: 2,086 whites, 4,466 free people of colour, 1,082 indigenous people and 10,009 enslaved Africans. The island had 159 sugar estates, 130 coffee estates and 60 cocoa estates, and it had acquired a French-speaking planter class, a large free coloured property-owning group and a legal system in Spanish.

That demography explains much of what followed. Trinidad had a free coloured population of more than 4,000 at a time when Jamaica's was a fraction of the size, and many of them owned land and slaves. It had a French-speaking elite that regarded the British as intruders for a generation. And it had slavery on a plantation scale without the entrenched planter institutions of the older colonies, which is why the British could govern it directly instead of bargaining with an assembly.

What did the British take in 1797?

A squadron under Sir Ralph Abercromby entered the Gulf of Paria in February 1797, landed at Mucurapo, and marched on Port of Spain. José María Chacón, the Spanish governor, capitulated on 18 February without a shot, on terms that guaranteed property, religion and existing law. Spain ceded the island formally in the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. Chacón was later tried in Cadiz for failing to defend the island; the council of war acquitted him, and the king overruled it, stripping him of his post and banishing him from Spanish dominions for life.

Britain now had a slave colony it had not expected and, after 1807, could not supply with new slaves. Trinidad was governed as a Crown colony: a governor and council, no elected assembly, ordinances rather than statutes. Williams argued that this was a deliberate refusal to create a planter parliament in a colony where the planters were French, Catholic and few, and where a locally elected assembly would have resisted both abolition and the rights of the free coloured population. Whatever the motive, the effect lasted: Trinidad had no elected members in its legislature until 1925, a full century after the older British islands.

Slavery in Trinidad was smaller than in the older colonies. At emancipation the island had 17,439 enslaved people, against some 360,000 in Jamaica, and four fifths of slaveholders owned fewer than ten people each. The Slavery Abolition Act took effect on 1 August 1834, with a period of apprenticeship that was meant to last until 1840. In Trinidad it collapsed almost immediately: crowds marched into Port of Spain, told the governor they had resolved to strike, and when seventeen ringleaders were sentenced to flogging and hard labour, followed them to the jail. The Riot Act was read, troops cleared the streets, and the protest remained almost entirely peaceful. Full freedom came on 1 August 1838.

How did indenture replace slavery?

Emancipation left the sugar estates without a labour force willing to work for the wages on offer. The freed population moved off the estates, squatted on Crown land or took work in the towns on its own terms; planters complained that they could not be relied upon in crop time. The colonial government's answer, after experiments with Portuguese from Madeira and Chinese from the 1850s, was India — the same remedy applied in British Guiana and Suriname. The first ship, the Fatel Razack, reached the Gulf of Paria on 30 May 1845 with 225 labourers aboard. Between then and 1917, 143,939 Indians arrived in Trinidad, the great majority through Calcutta and a minority through Madras.

The contract bound a labourer for five years to a named estate, at wages fixed by ordinance, with a free return passage at the end or a grant of land in commutation. A Protector of Immigrants was appointed to enforce the terms. In practice the protector was often the planters' ally, and the sanction behind the contract was the jail: absence from work, "idleness" and breach of contract were criminal offences, and the penalties were imprisonment with hard labour. Williams's summary — that indenture was "slavery plus a constable" — is polemical, but the penal element is not in dispute.

Housing and health were worse than the legal terms suggested. A memorandum submitted to the Royal Franchise Commission in 1888 by Lechmere Guppy, the mayor of San Fernando, described the barracks in which indentured labourers were housed: long wooden buildings ten or twelve feet wide, divided into rooms by partitions that stopped short of the roof, without latrines or cooking places, where overseers pulled men from their beds before daylight in crop time. A commission sent by the government of India in 1913 found the population riddled with hookworm and malaria. Mortality on the voyages, and among the very young and very old on the estates, was high enough that the system depended on continuous recruitment.

Indenture ended in 1917, under pressure from Indian nationalists and after decades of inquiry, and it left the island permanently changed. The Indian population settled in the cane belt of Caroni and the south, built temples, mosques and Presbyterian schools, and moved into cocoa, rice and retail trade as the contracts expired. Their descendants are now the largest single ethnic group. The system also produced one of the earliest and bloodiest confrontations of the colonial order: on 30 October 1884, police fired into a Hosay procession at San Fernando that had been banned from entering the town, killing 22 people and wounding more than a hundred. The figure is contested, but the fact of the shooting is not.

Why was Tobago joined to Trinidad?

Tobago had been fought over for two centuries before it became a British colony for good. Dutch settlers built Fort Vlissingen in 1628; Courlanders from the Duchy of Courland tried three times to plant a colony, and the two settlements coexisted uneasily until the Courlanders surrendered in 1659. The island then passed through English, Dutch and French hands, was declared neutral by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, was assigned to Britain in 1763, taken by France in 1781 and ceded to France in 1783, restored to Britain at Amiens in 1802, retaken in 1803 by troops from Barbados and ceded formally by France in 1814.

Its economy was sugar and its society was small, brutal and bankrupt. Tobago had 18,153 enslaved people in 1807 and a planter class that was already mortgaged to London merchants. Emancipation in 1834 destroyed the labour system, and the Sugar Duties Act of 1846, which equalised duties on colonial and foreign sugar, destroyed the price. Planters turned to métayage, a sharecropping arrangement under which the labourer received a share of the sugar he made; it survived in Tobago until the end of the century, when the cane industry was abandoned altogether.

Institutional collapse followed economic collapse. Tobago's elected assembly, which had governed the island since the seventeenth century, was abolished in 1874 and the island became a Crown colony three years later. The British then did what they had done elsewhere in the smaller islands: it attached the bankrupt colony to a wealthier neighbour. Parliament passed the Trinidad and Tobago Act in 1887; it was proclaimed on 17 November 1888 and took effect on 1 January 1889, uniting the two colonies under one governor and one supreme court. In 1899 Tobago was reduced to a ward of Trinidad, administered by a warden. It remained a poor, neglected dependency for most of the next century, its economy kept alive by cocoa, then tourism and remittances.

The union was administrative, not federal, and Tobago's political identity survived it. The island got its own House of Assembly in 1980, with limited powers over local services, and a Tobago-born prime minister, A. N. R. Robinson, in 1986. In 2021 the assembly election produced a six-six tie; the chief secretary, Farley Augustine, later broke with the PNM and founded the Tobago People's Party, which took two seats in the 2025 national election. Tobago's demand for a larger share of energy revenue and for a federal relationship is now a permanent feature of the constitution's unfinished business.

How did oil get under the politics?

Oil was known before it was wanted. The Pitch Lake at La Brea had been used for caulking ships since the Spanish period, and an American company drilled there in 1857, striking oil at 280 feet. Commercial production began at Point Fortin in 1908, and by 1910 the colony was producing 47,000 barrels a year; output rose through the First World War, when the Royal Navy converted its ships from coal to oil, and by the 1930s oil had displaced sugar as the colony's principal export. Trinidad's oil was close to deep water, close to the United States and outside the hurricane belt, which made it strategically valuable in a way that sugar never was.

That value was priced in 1940. Under the destroyers-for-bases agreement, Britain leased 99-year rights over the Chaguaramas peninsula, on the north-west tip of Trinidad, for an American naval base. The base and the surrounding land became a foreign enclave within a colony, and the site was later chosen as the capital of the projected West Indies Federation. When Eric Williams's People's National Movement took office in 1956, the demand for the return of Chaguaramas became the central nationalist grievance: the base was on Trinidadian soil, it blocked the development of the peninsula, and its lease had been signed by a British government that no Trinidadian had elected. The United States agreed to give up most of the site in 1960 and the base was returned in 1963.

Oil also shaped the labour movement. The oilfields of Fyzabad and Point Fortin employed a largely immigrant workforce — Grenadians, Barbadians, Vincentians — who were not tied to the sugar estates and who could shut down the colony's main export by striking. The trade unions that grew there after the First World War were the first mass organisations in Trinidadian politics. The man who broke them open was Tubal Uriah Butler, a Spiritual Baptist preacher from Grenada who had been lamed in an oilfield accident and had been organising in Fyzabad since the early 1920s.

What did the 1937 riots break open?

The strike that became a general uprising began on 19 June 1937, when police in Fyzabad tried to arrest Butler while he was addressing a meeting of oil workers. He had been threatening a sit-down strike on the oilfields, had been expelled from the Trinidad Labour Party the year before, and had formed his own party with perhaps a thousand members. The crowd refused to let him be taken; in the confusion a plain-clothes policeman, Corporal Charlie King, was chased into a shop, and when he jumped from the window and broke his leg the crowd beat him, poured oil over him and burned him to death.

The disturbances then spread across the oil belt and the sugar belt: Point Fortin, San Fernando, Usine Sainte-Madeleine, Penal, Rio Claro, and Port of Spain, where workers tried to stop a train carrying rifles and ammunition south. The governor mobilised the volunteer Trinidad Light Horse, telegraphed Bermuda for a cruiser, and within days two Royal Navy ships, HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter, were in the Gulf; a warship also appeared off Tobago and dropped leaflets from a seaplane. Some 2,200 police, specials and volunteers were under arms. Butler evaded arrest for weeks, and the reward offered for information was never claimed.

Fourteen people were killed and dozens wounded, and the commission of inquiry that followed did something unusual for a British colony: it blamed the employers. It found that wages in the oilfields had fallen in real terms while production rose, that the companies denied any general demand for increases because there was no machinery through which demand could be expressed, and that "had there existed organised means of collective bargaining ... there can be little doubt but that the disturbances which subsequently arose might have been avoided". The Moyne Commission, sent to the West Indies in 1938 after a wave of Caribbean strikes, reached similar conclusions across the region and recommended trade unions, wage boards and colonial development funding.

The political consequences were swift. The British conceded universal adult suffrage in 1946, and the first election under it returned a fragmented legislature of independents and small parties; the governor then chose Albert Gomes as chief minister. The old Crown colony system survived the war, but not by much: the 1950s were a decade of party formation, and the decisive one was formed in 1956.

The same decades produced a culture that the colonial state had spent a century trying to suppress. The Canboulay processions of the 1880s, banned and then regulated after the riots of 1881, became Carnival; the drumming ordinances of the 1880s pushed the bands onto bamboo sticks, and from the 1930s onto oil drums cut and tuned into pans, which by the 1940s had become the steelband. Calypso moved from the yards into tents with paid audiences and then onto commercial recordings. The first Trinidadian novels in English — Alfred Mendes and C. L. R. James in the 1930s, Sam Selvon and V. S. Naipaul in the 1950s — were written by people who had grown up in that world and left it.

How did Eric Williams take the country to independence?

Eric Williams was born in Port of Spain in 1911, won an island scholarship in 1932, took a first in history at Oxford and a doctorate in 1938, and published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, arguing that British abolition had been driven as much by the declining profitability of the sugar colonies as by humanitarianism. He spent the war years in the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission in Washington, and returned to Trinidad in 1955 to lecture in Woodford Square, where tens of thousands came to hear him explain the constitution, the economy and the case for self-government.

The People's National Movement was founded in 1956 as a multi-ethnic nationalist party with a predominantly African support base and an explicit commitment to including the Indian population. In the general election of 24 September 1956 it won 13 of the 24 elected seats with 39.75 per cent of the vote on an 80 per cent turnout, and Williams became chief minister. His programme was "discipline, production, tolerance", and his early governments built schools, made secondary education free, bought out the telephone system and the national airline, and set up a central bank.

Trinidad then joined the West Indies Federation in 1958, with Chaguaramas designated as its federal capital, and Williams took a seat in the federal parliament. The federation was never given the powers or the money to work. Jamaica's referendum of September 1961 voted to leave, and Williams's verdict — "one from ten leaves nought" — ended the project; Trinidad and Tobago withdrew in January 1962. Independence followed on 31 August 1962, under a constitution that kept the Queen as head of state, a governor-general as her representative, and a bicameral parliament.

The first decade was not easy. The economy was still sugar and oil, unemployment was high, and the government had inherited a colonial civil service and a school system run largely by churches. Williams's answer was industrialisation by invitation: incentives for foreign firms to assemble goods for the protected regional market, an aluminium smelter, a fertiliser plant, an oil refinery. Much of it worked for a while; some of it, like the incentives themselves, created a dependency on concessions that outlasted the industries.

What did independence expose?

The first great crisis came in 1970. The trigger was the arrest of Caribbean students at Sir George Williams University in Montreal and the banning of Walter Rodney from Jamaica, but the fuel was unemployment among the young, the visibility of a white and Syrian business elite, and the Vietnam-era mood of Black consciousness across the Atlantic. Marches through Port of Spain in February and March brought out tens of thousands. In April the government declared a state of emergency and arrested fifteen Black Power leaders; a section of the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment mutinied at Teteron Barracks under Raffique Shah and Rex Lassalle, took hostages and held out for five days until the Coast Guard and loyal units isolated them.

The mutiny failed, but the government did not recover its confidence. In 1971 the opposition boycotted the election and the PNM won every seat; in 1973, with the economy in trouble and his own position weak, Williams was preparing to resign when the Arab-Israeli war quadrupled the price of oil. Trinidad's revenues rose fourfold in three years. The country borrowed against reserves it could not have imagined, built the Eric Williams Plaza and a great deal else, subsidised food, fuel and transport, and expanded the public service. On 1 August 1976 it became a republic, with the last governor-general, Ellis Clarke, as president; the constitution of that year, with its ceremonial presidency and its retention of appeals to the Privy Council, still governs.

The boom lasted until 1982, when oil prices fell, and the government spent for another four years on reserves and foreign loans. By 1986 the currency had been devalued, unemployment was in double digits and the PNM had been in office for thirty years. The National Alliance for Reconstruction, a coalition of the PNM's opponents under A. N. R. Robinson, won 33 of 36 seats. It was the first change of government since independence, and it lasted four years.

Why did the 1990 coup attempt nearly succeed?

The NAR broke apart in 1988 when its Indian component withdrew under Basdeo Panday, leaving Robinson with a narrow majority and an economy still in crisis. On 27 July 1990, more than a hundred men of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a small Islamist group led by Yasin Abu Bakr, attacked the Parliament building and the television station. Forty-two of them took the prime minister, most of the cabinet and dozens of others hostage in the Red House; Robinson was shot in the leg and beaten. Another group seized the police headquarters. Rioting and looting spread through Port of Spain, and 24 people were killed, including an MP.

The group's grievance was a land dispute over a mosque site, but its deeper appeal was to young Afro-Trinidadian men in the depressed wards east of the capital, and its ideology borrowed from the Nation of Islam and from Libyan patronage. It had no popular base and no plan for government. The coup collapsed when the army and police held out and the hostages were released in exchange for an amnesty. The amnesty was challenged in the courts, which declined to reopen the case; none of the 114 charged served a sentence for the coup, though several were later convicted of other crimes.

The political system then settled into the pattern it has kept since. The PNM won in 1991 under Patrick Manning; the UNC won in 1995 under Basdeo Panday, the first prime minister of Indian descent, with the support of Robinson's NAR; the UNC won again in 2000. In 2001 the parties tied at 18 seats each, and President Robinson appointed Manning despite the UNC having won the popular vote — a decision that left parliament unable to elect a speaker and the country without a budget for a year. The PNM won outright in 2002 and 2007; the People's Partnership, a coalition led by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, won in 2010 and made her the first woman prime minister; the PNM returned in 2015 and 2020 under Keith Rowley.

What did the energy boom leave behind?

The transition from oil to gas had begun in the 1990s, when the state-owned and foreign-owned companies that had taken over the old oilfields began to develop the gas fields off the east coast. Atlantic LNG, a consortium led by BP and Shell with the state gas company, opened its first liquefaction train at Point Fortin in 1999; a fourth train followed in 2006, making the complex one of the largest in the world. Gas also fed ammonia and methanol plants, which made Trinidad one of the largest exporters of both chemicals, and an aluminium smelter and a steel plant that have had a more chequered history.

The model worked while gas was scarce and prices were high, and it has been in trouble since about 2010, when the fields began to decline faster than new ones could be developed. The country's plants now run below capacity; successive governments have courted Venezuela for access to the Dragon field, which lies in Venezuelan waters close to the Trinidadian border and which has been the subject of successive United States sanctions licences since 2023. ExxonMobil has taken exploration blocks in deep water and talks of repeating its Guyana success, but no production has begun.

The fiscal consequences are visible everywhere. The Heritage and Stabilisation Fund, set up in 2000 to hold windfall revenues, has been drawn down repeatedly and stood at about US$6 billion in the mid-2020s. The state oil company, Petrotrin, was closed in 2018 after years of losses and replaced by three successor companies; the refinery at Pointe-à-Pierre has been mothballed since. The collapse of CL Financial in 2009, which required a bailout put at TT$23 billion, cost the country more than any single act of corruption before or since. GDP per head in current dollars is lower than it was in 2008.

The social settlement that the boom financed has proved harder to unwind. Free education from primary to university, subsidised fuel and electricity, a large public service and a public health system that is free at the point of use are all popular, and all were built on revenue that no longer arrives. Governments of both parties have promised diversification — tourism, financial services, creative industries, agriculture — and delivered little of it. The economy remains what it was in 1975: a hydrocarbon exporter with a small manufacturing sector and a large state.

Why are race and crime still the country's fault lines?

The two-party system maps closely onto the two largest ethnic groups. The PNM's base is Afro-Trinidadian and urban; the UNC's is Indo-Trinidadian and rural, with a strong base in the sugar belt and the south. Both parties need cross-ethnic votes to win — the UNC took 54 per cent in 2025 — but the arithmetic of a 35/34/23 population split means that no party can govern for long without at least a fifth of the other bloc. The 2001 tie, the 2007 "poster war", the constant accusations of ethnic favouritism in state employment and contracts, and the habit of describing the other side as a communal party are all symptoms of that arithmetic.

Crime is the issue that has displaced race at the top of the political agenda without displacing the racial language used to discuss it. Trinidad has been a transshipment point for cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia since the 1980s, and the gangs that grew up around the trade armed themselves from the United States. Murders rose from fewer than 50 a year in the 1980s to 97 in 1998, 360 in 2006 and a record 605 in 2022, a rate of more than 40 per 100,000. The violence is concentrated in a handful of wards in and around Port of Spain — Laventille, Morvant, Belmont, Diego Martin — and it is overwhelmingly young men killing young men.

The state's response has been carceral. A state of emergency declared on 30 December 2024 after a weekend of shootings was extended repeatedly; a further declaration on 3 March 2026 followed a surge in gang killings and allowed arrest without charge. By the time it was allowed to lapse on 16 September 2026, more than 5,700 people had been detained and about 700 charged, and the courts had begun releasing people whose detention could not be justified. The government's answer was the Special Operations Bill, passed by the House in September and by the Senate on a 15–15 tie broken by an independent senator, which gives the police and army powers that the bar association, the opposition and press bodies said were unconstitutional. A police bill in October drew further complaints that it would obstruct reporting.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Trinidad took in tens of thousands of Venezuelans after 2017, most of them without legal status, and the government's refusal to grant refugee status has been criticised by the United Nations. Tobago, which has none of the oil and gas and a fraction of the crime, wants a bigger share of both revenue and powers. The political class that has run the country since 1956 is also changing hands: the 2025 election was the first since 1991 that the PNM fought without a leader who had held office before, and one in which a Tobago party, Farley Augustine's Tobago People's Party, won two seats in the national parliament.

Common myths about Trinidad and Tobago

Timeline of Trinidad and Tobago

What the map shows next

At 1963 on the map the map draws the new state in its first year, with Tobago attached as a ward and the federation already gone: 880,000 people, sugar still employing more workers than oil, and Port of Spain a city of perhaps 100,000.

At 1986 on the map it shows a country of a million people at the end of the oil boom, with the PNM's thirty-year dominance about to end and the energy sector already shifting from crude to gas. At 2010 on the map it shows the republic at the moment the People's Partnership took office, with the murder rate near its peak and Atlantic LNG at full capacity. The distance between those three frames is the whole story of the independence era: a small state that used a temporary windfall to build institutions it could not afterwards afford.