Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago by Jerome Teelucksingh (review)

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. The legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and postemancipation indentured servitude collide in Trinidad, making it an excellent site to analyze the politics of race, labor, and empire.

The book begins with a discussion of the division between black Trinidadian labor activists who opposed the indentured Indian labor program and those who sought to recruit Indian workers into the labor movement. Teelucksingh also spends a great deal of time following early Trinidadian labor leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, the foundation of the Trinidadian Workingman’s Association, and the labor movement’s foray into electoral politics, particularly given the restricted suffrage rights in colonial Trinidad. There is also valuable information about vagrancy laws and the campaign against child labor in the colony.

Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago would benefit from a greater engagement with the scholarship and debates within Caribbean labor history and more attention to social history and political organizing in working-class communities. As it is, there is a missed opportunity for Teelucksingh to connect his research to broader debates about nationalism, decolonization, and labor mobilization in the English-speaking Caribbean. One of the most surprising omissions is that he does not cite or mention Ken Post’s classic Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labor Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath. Grounded in Marxist analysis, Post’s massive and detailed book analyzes the 1930s strike wave in Jamaica that led to the emergence of Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley’s leadership in the struggle for Jamaican independence. While a book very much of its time, published in 1978 and enmeshed in Marxist discourse, it is a groundbreaking work and one that West Indian labor historians, particularly those of the pre-independence period, cannot ignore. Given that Teelucksingh also identifies his work in a Marxist tradition and traces the same time period for Trinidadian history, this absence is even more notable. Does he agree with Post’s classic analysis and want to extend it to Trinidad? Or does he argue for an alternate political development in Trinidad’s labor movement and independence struggle? A comparison of the pre- independence labor politics in Trinidad and Jamaica would be quite valuable, particularly given the distinct racial politics of each island. In addition, there are several newer works on Trinidad’s labor and political history that could further develop Teelucksingh’s analysis of political and labor activism; for example, Harvey Neptune’s Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation and Colin Palmer’s Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean or again, for a more comparative perspective, Palmer’s newest work, Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica.

Teelucksingh also assumes a great deal of knowledge of Trinidadian history, and as a result, he does not narrate or analyze the 1937 strikes that shifted labor politics in the colony. Instead, he remains focused on the formal labor organizations and their political campaigns within the colonial legislature. This leaves the 1937 strikes unexamined, when an analysis of the workers...