ABSTRACT
Trinidad, the most southerly island of the West Indian archipelago, is situated off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. Valued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for its rich sugarcane plantations, worked by African slaves, the island came under British rule in 1797. Not long after, a sudden labor shortage was brought about by the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire and in 1838 brought the economy close to ruin. The subsequent introduction of indentured laborers from India into the British Caribbean colonies between 1845 and 1917 averted such a crisis. Some 144,000 Indians were brought to Trinidad; they were mostly from Uttar Pradesh, plus some five thousand from Madras. By the 1860s, East Indians represented the backbone of the island’s single-crop plantation economy. Many of these “coolies,” as they were known, remained on the island; at the turn of the millennium, their descendants still occupy the swampy land along the western coast and the central interior county of Caroni.
