Investigating the foundations of private property beyond the realms of the house, this chapter gestures towards a “geography of capitalism”. It examines the wider terrain of private property—material, abstract and mobile—in relation to flows of commodities, capital and labour forces in western Trinidad. In Marxian analysis, private ownership lies at the root of capitalism, acting as the driving force behind expropriated labour. In the American tropics, expropriated labour and produce began with the first European contact with the region. Settlers were quick to capitalize on the exportable natural products of the New World, while European tastes developed the market. Such trafficking revealed that imperialism was not only shaped by expansion, but also consumption, signifying not simply an empire-building project but, to paraphrase Sidney Mintz, an empire-swallowing.

In Sweetness and Power, Mintz argues that agricultural and economic exploitation in the Caribbean was fuelled by Europe's sweet tooth. In the early to mid-twentieth century the Caribbean plantation began to face new challenges. With no recourse to slave or indentured labour, the plantation was forced to compete in a global market in which the price of tropical commodities, such as sugar, was lowered by an increase of tropical agriculture worldwide and the production of northern substitutes for tropical products. In the case of sugar, beet became a northern rival to tropical cane, its production accounting for roughly 60% of total world output by 1900.

Against such tropical and global competition and the effective closure of the US market to British West Indian sugar, Trinidad's sugar industry began to wane. Conversely, while sugar profits fell, cocoa planters enjoyed record profits throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, particularly during the First World War, when the cessation of transatlantic shipping to Europe caused prices to soar. It was a period when “Cocoa was King” in Trinidad, a phrase which recurs in Lawrence Scott's novel Witchbroom and his short story “Malgrétout”.