The history of Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost islands of the Caribbean, lie just off the coast of Venezuela, and Trinidad was joined to the South American mainland until the end of the last ice age. Amerindian peoples lived here for some seven thousand years before Columbus arrived in 1498. Spain held Trinidad for three centuries but barely settled it, while Tobago was fought over by the Dutch, the Courlanders, the French and the British. A plantation society built on African slavery took shape only in the late eighteenth century, and after emancipation the British brought nearly 150,000 indentured labourers from India, making the colony one of the most diverse societies in the Americas. Oil, labour struggles and the leadership of Eric Williams carried it to independence in 1962, and it has since been a parliamentary republic shaped by its petroleum wealth and by the politics of its two largest communities, of African and Indian descent.

Trinidad was the gateway through which people from South America moved into the Caribbean islands. The oldest known site, Banwari Trace in south-western Trinidad, dates to around 5000 BCE and has yielded the remains of the oldest human skeleton yet found in the region. These Archaic or Ortoiroid people were hunter-gatherers and fishers who made stone and shell tools but no pottery, and they occupied dozens of sites on both islands. Around 250 BCE farmers of the Saladoid culture arrived from the Orinoco basin, bringing cassava cultivation and finely decorated pottery, and from Trinidad they moved north up the island chain. Barrancoid people followed after about 250 CE, settling in the south of Trinidad, and later Arauquinoid influences reached the islands from the Orinoco.

From about 1300 a new culture, known to archaeologists as Mayoid, spread across Trinidad and lasted into the colonial period. When Europeans arrived, the island was densely populated by several peoples, among them the Nepoya and Suppoya, who were probably Arawak-speaking, and the Yao and other groups who spoke Carib languages. They lived in villages governed by chiefs, grew cassava, maize and other crops, fished and traded with the mainland, and Warao people from the Orinoco delta visited regularly. Tobago was held by the Kalinago, who used it as a base and defended it fiercely against early European landings.

Christopher Columbus reached Trinidad on 31 July 1498, on his third voyage, and named it after the Holy Trinity; he sighted Tobago a few weeks later but did not land. In 1511 Spain declared the island's people to be Caribs, which under Spanish law made them liable to enslavement, and slave raiders carried off large numbers to work in the pearl fisheries of nearby Margarita. Settlement came slowly. Antonio Sedeño was driven off by Indigenous forces in 1532, built a stockade at Cumucurapo the following year, then lost his men to Francisco Pizarro's expedition to Peru. Only in 1592 did Antonio de Berrío found a lasting town, San José de Oruña, the modern St Joseph, as a base for his search for El Dorado. The English adventurer Walter Raleigh attacked it in 1595 and took Berrío prisoner.

For almost two centuries Trinidad remained a poor and neglected outpost of the Spanish Empire, governed at different times from Santo Domingo, Bogotá and Caracas. Spanish settlers held Indigenous people in encomiendas, a system of forced labour little different from slavery, and from 1687 Catalan Capuchin friars gathered survivors into missions. Resistance continued: in 1699 Indigenous people at the Arena mission killed the mission's priests, and the Spanish reprisals that followed were brutal. Disease, forced labour and dispersal shrank the Indigenous population, but it was still the majority in 1783, when some 2,000 of the island's 2,763 inhabitants were Amerindians. Their descendants are today represented by the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community in Arima.

Tobago, with its sheltered bays, attracted the rivals of Spain. Dutch colonists from Zeeland, in the Dutch Republic, founded a settlement in 1628, and the Duchy of Courland, a small Baltic state in what is now Latvia, made several attempts before establishing New Courland at Great Courland Bay in 1654, alongside a revived Dutch colony. The Dutch took over the Courland colony in 1659, by which time some 7,000 enslaved Africans worked about 120 plantations. Over the next century and a half the island passed repeatedly between the Dutch, English, French and Courlanders, changing hands twenty-two times by one count between 1626 and 1814. In 1748 it was declared neutral, and Indigenous refugees from the mainland and from Saint Vincent settled there.

Britain received Tobago in 1763 and quickly turned it into a sugar colony. By 1791 about 94 per cent of its 15,000 people were enslaved, governed by a slave act that treated them as property without rights. France held Tobago from 1781 to 1793 and again briefly in 1802 and 1803, before ceding it to Britain in 1814.

Spain finally tried to develop Trinidad in the late eighteenth century. The Cedula of Population of 1783 offered land and tax exemptions to Roman Catholic settlers from friendly nations, with extra land for each enslaved person they brought. Unusually, free people of colour were also offered land, at half the rate given to white settlers. Thousands of French planters, free coloured people and enslaved Africans arrived from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada, Saint Lucia and other islands, many fleeing the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. By 1797 the population had grown to over 17,000, more than half of them enslaved, and Trinidad had a large French-speaking free coloured class, some of whom owned enslaved people themselves. French creole became the common language, and French Creole families formed the island's elite well into the twentieth century.

In February 1797, during the war between Britain and Spain, a fleet under Sir Ralph Abercromby sailed into the Gulf of Paria, and the Spanish governor, José María Chacón, surrendered without a fight. Britain kept the island at the peace of 1802 and governed it as a crown colony under a governor, with no elected assembly, while keeping Spanish law. Its first British governor, Thomas Picton, ruled by terror, using torture and summary executions against enslaved people and others, and was later tried in London for authorising the torture of a young free woman of colour, Luisa Calderón.

The British expanded the sugar estates and imported more enslaved Africans through the Atlantic slave trade until it was abolished in 1807. By 1803 there were over 20,000 enslaved people in Trinidad, worked on sugar, cocoa, coffee and cotton estates. In 1816 several hundred African Americans who had escaped slavery and fought for Britain in the War of 1812, known as the Merikens, were settled in villages in the south. When the abolition of slavery in the British Empire took effect on 1 August 1834, the formerly enslaved were told they must serve six years as apprentices. Crowds in Port of Spain protested, chanting that they would not accept six years, and the apprenticeship system was ended early, with full freedom on 1 August 1838. Many freed people left the estates to work their own land or move to the towns.

To replace the labour of the freed people, planters turned to Asia. The first indentured labourers from India arrived on 30 May 1845, and between then and 1917 about 147,600 came to Trinidad, most from the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of what are now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the British Raj, and a smaller number from Madras. They signed contracts for five years of estate labour, usually with the promise of a return passage, in conditions that critics at the time called a new system of slavery: low wages, punishments for leaving the estates, crowded barracks and high death rates. Most stayed, settling on land of their own or taking land in place of the passage home, and they brought Hinduism and Islam into the colony's life. Indian immigrants were about a third of the population by 1911. Smaller numbers of people from China, Portuguese from Madeira and labourers from other Caribbean islands also arrived, and Venezuelan farmers helped build the cocoa industry, which flourished in the late nineteenth century. Tensions between the Indian community and the colonial authorities erupted in 1884, when police fired on a Hosay procession in San Fernando, killing more than twenty people. Hindu and Muslim marriages did not gain full legal recognition until the mid-twentieth century.

Tobago's sugar economy collapsed in the nineteenth century, and its planters fell back on sharecropping. To save money, Britain joined the two colonies in 1889, and in 1899 Tobago became a ward of Trinidad, losing its own assembly.

Oil was struck near the Pitch Lake at La Brea in 1857, and commercial production began in the early twentieth century, growing rapidly from 1910. Oil soon replaced sugar and cocoa, whose industry was destroyed by disease and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Captain Arthur Cipriani, a white Creole veteran of the First World War, led the Trinidad Workingmen's Association and fought for workers' rights and wider suffrage after limited elections began in 1925. In 1937 an oilfield strike led by Tubal Uriah Butler, a preacher born in Grenada and labour organiser, spread into riots in which about a dozen people were killed. The disturbances, part of a wave across the British Caribbean, led to the Moyne Commission and to the growth of trade unions. During the Second World War the United States built a large naval base at Chaguaramas.

Universal adult suffrage came in 1946. Ten years later the historian Eric Williams, author of an influential study arguing that the profits of slavery helped finance British industrialisation, founded the People's National Movement and won the 1956 election. Williams pressed for the return of Chaguaramas and led Trinidad into the West Indies Federation, but after Jamaica voted to leave in 1961 he declared that "one from ten leaves nought" and withdrew. Trinidad and Tobago became independent on 31 August 1962, with Williams as prime minister. The period also saw the flowering of the islands' culture: Carnival, calypso and the steelpan, invented in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s from oil drums and other metal containers, became national symbols.

Many young Afro-Trinidadians felt that independence had changed little for them. In 1970 the Black Power movement led weeks of marches and strikes, a state of emergency was declared, and part of the army mutinied before surrendering after several days. Williams survived, and the oil price rises after 1973 brought a boom that funded state industries, rising incomes and widespread corruption. The country became a republic on 1 August 1976, with the former governor-general, Sir Ellis Clarke, as its first president. Williams died in office in 1981, and when oil prices fell the economy went into a long recession. In 1986 the National Alliance for Reconstruction, a coalition that aimed to unite voters of African and Indian descent, ended thirty years of PNM rule under the Tobagonian A. N. R. Robinson. In 1980 Tobago had regained its own House of Assembly.

On 27 July 1990 members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Black Muslim group in a long dispute with the state over land, stormed the Red House, the seat of Parliament, and the national television station, holding Robinson and members of his government hostage for six days while looting and violence engulfed Port of Spain. The group surrendered under an amnesty that the courts later debated for years.

In 1995 Basdeo Panday of the United National Congress became the first prime minister of Indian descent, and politics settled into competition between the PNM, drawing most support from Afro-Trinidadians, and the UNC, based largely among Indo-Trinidadians. Patrick Manning led PNM governments in 1991 to 1995 and 2001 to 2010. Natural gas, exported as liquefied natural gas and used in petrochemical plants, overtook oil as the basis of the economy, bringing a second boom in the 2000s. Kamla Persad-Bissessar became the first woman prime minister in 2010, Keith Rowley of the PNM governed from 2015, and Paula-Mae Weekes became the first woman president in 2018. Violent crime has become a central public concern. In the general election of 28 April 2025 the UNC won 26 of the 41 seats and Persad-Bissessar returned as prime minister, while the Tobago People's Party won both of Tobago's seats.