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Trinidad and Tobago achieved full independence via the Trinidad and Tobago Independence Act 1962 on 31 August 1962 within the Commonwealth with Queen Elizabeth II as its titular head of state. On 1 August 1976, the country became a republic, and the last Governor-General, Sir Ellis Clarke, became the first President. [a]
After the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, the plantation owners of Trinidad were desperate for new sources of labour. In 1839 the British government began a programme of recruiting Indian labourers in Calcutta to be sent to Trinidad. They bound themselves to work as indentured labourers for a set number of years on the plantations.
The Slave Act, like other slave laws in the British West Indies, was designed to ensure that in the course of acting as humans, slaves did not cease to function as property. Striking or wounding a white person, wounding another slave, setting fire to sugar cane fields or buildings, or attempting to leave the island were all punishable by death ...
The most common ethnic groups of the enslaved Africans in Trinidad and Tobago were Igbo, Kongo, Ibibio, Yoruba and Malinke people. All of these groups, among others, were heavily affected by the Atlantic slave trade. The population census of 1813 shows that among African-born slaves the Igbo were the most numerous. [3]
The Port of Spain Gazette was a newspaper based in Port of Spain, Trinidad (and later, Trinidad and Tobago) between 1825 and 1959. [6] The paper took a proslavery position in the 1830s, and later supported the rights of local elites against the Crown colony government.
Capitalism and Slavery is the published version of the doctoral dissertation of Eric Williams, who was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. It advances a number of theses on the impact of economic factors on the decline of slavery, specifically the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies, from the second half of the 18th century.
It was not until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that the institution was finally abolished, but on a gradual basis. [30] Since slave owners in the various colonies (not only the Caribbean) were losing their unpaid labourers, the government set aside £20 million for compensation but it did not offer the former slaves any reparations. [31] [32]
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