Jerome Teelucksingh’s Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago argues that workers in the labor movement, rather than middle-class politicians or benevolent British colonists, were the central protagonists in the fight for Trinidadian independence. This book begins in the late nineteenth century and traces the organized labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago up until the postwar era and the origins of the short-lived British West Indian Federation. As Teelucksingh writes, “Democracy was neither a gift to the West Indian colonies bestowed by imperial Britain nor it was [sic] granted out of good intentions. Instead, it was consistently and brazenly demanded by Labour” (174).
Like that of Guyana, Trinidad’s population is a plurality of former black slaves and former indentured Indian migrants, and so the racial politics within these two countries has an alternate and more complicated racial formation than the other former British West Indian colonies....