‘Whenever Society Is in Travail Liberty Is Born’: The Mass Strike of 1919 in Colonial Trinidad

Abstract

In colonial Trinidad in 1919, rising industrial turmoil culminated in a rolling mass strike that would shake this outpost of the British empire to its foundations. Though it is often located as an important part of Trinidadian or at best Caribbean labour history—a precursor in many ways to the powerful wave of labour rebellions that swept the Anglophone colonial Caribbean in the 1930s—this chapter will examine the strike through the prism of transnational and global labour history. It will explore how the strike had indigenous and international roots and will aim to situate the inspiring mass strike of 1919 within the wider international turmoil of that year, not least the rising challenge the militancy of organised labour posed in the imperial metropole of Britain itself.