The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of society and race relations in Trinidad in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, with special reference to the white, coloured, and black groups. These thirty years saw few striking or momentous events. They were not obviously formative years, as were the three decades after 1838, when the ex-slaves entered the society as free men, and when new ethnic groups were coming in to make the population even more heterogeneous. No major political changes took place, although there were important shifts in the economy, with a marked expansion of the cocoa industry, the development of cane-farming, and considerable diversification. By 1870, Trinidad had become nearly as cosmopolitan as it was a century later: no new national or ethnic group came in after that date, with the exception of the Syrio-Lebanese. Yet these last years of the century, peaceful and uneventful as they seem, were important for the evolution of the society. Trinidad was a Crown Colony; the white elite was a powerful influence on policy-making and administration; it controlled much of the economy; but gradually a non-white middle class was emerging, augmented from below. This development will be a crucial theme of this study, for it was the coloured and black middle class which began to articulate a ‘national’ ideology, and which held the key to the political and social future of Trinidad.

Our study focuses on Creole society in Trinidad in the later nineteenth century. Contemporary Trinidadians understood Creole society to include people of European and African descent, and all those of mixed descent, but to exclude the Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants.