In search of free labour: Trinidad and the abolition of the British slave trade

Abstract

In 1797 Britain seized the island of Trinidad from Spain; in 1802 the island was formally ceded to Britain at the Peace of Amiens. To both the government and anti-slavery leaders the question of how the colony was to be developed under British rule proved critical, particularly with the prospect of the abolition of the British slave trade. The island’s plantation economy was a relatively recent development, dating from Spain’s reversal in 1784 of its policy of excluding foreign settlement and linked predominantly to the movement of slave owners from French islands. From this point until 1802, the importation of slaves into the colony rapidly increased, spurred by the French and Haitian revolutions and intense warfare in the Caribbean.1 In the event, the British government decided to halt this trend, ceasing to grant land and thus preventing the realization of the island’s full potential as a slave-based plantation economy. In turn, however, this decision raised the question of what sort of labour system and what groups of workers should stand in place of slavery: how was colonialism in the Caribbean to be imagined without slaves? The capacity to envisage a labour regime to replace that of slavery was a pre-condition for the abolition of the British slave trade and of slavery in the Caribbean.2 This chapter explores the various (failed) schemes to settle free workers in Trinidad during the first decade of the nineteenth century and debate over free labour in the British Caribbean.