ABSTRACT
Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) is a twin island nation-state and thus does not have a unitary imperial history. The smaller island, Tobago, changed hands over 20 times before it became a British colony in 1814. The larger and more dominant island, Trinidad, experienced over three centuries of Spanish imperialist rule from 1498 until it was incorporated into the British Empire in 1802. It is during the historical period spanning the islands’ formal incorporation into the British Empire to their informal incorporation into the US Empire that developments with regards to accountancy took place, for it was the economic transformations of that period which called for a particular confi guration of accounting institutions and labour (Annisette 1999, 2000, 2003). In particular in 1907, just over 100 years after being ceded to the British, oil was discovered in Trinidad, and in 1910 when Churchill decided to convert the British navy from coal to oil, Trinidad was transformed from a sugar plantation economy to a petroleumbased plantation economy.1 During World War I, Trinidad’s oil production doubled from one to two million barrels per year (Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources 1984), making the island the largest source of purely British oil (Rothenberg and Wishner 1976; Johnson 1975). By 1946, oil accounted for as much as 75 per cent of the country’s export earnings (Carrington 1967). As has been shown elsewhere (Annisette 1999), Trinidad’s experience as a plantation economy, dominated fi rst by sugar and later by petroleum, was a critical factor in the way the island’s accountancy labour market and practice organizations developed. This chapter focuses on the development of the latter.
