Istwa Nou

Trinidad and Tobago received roughly 44,000 captive Africans directly from the African coast, a small figure by Caribbean standards, and most of it arrived in the closing decades of the traffic. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the islands were a Spanish backwater with little plantation agriculture on them. That changed when Britain took Trinidad in the 1790s and began planting sugar in earnest. British ships carried almost the whole trade, and Liverpool alone accounted for more than two thirds of the recorded voyages. The captives came chiefly from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. The timing gave Trinidad an unusual population. Its African arrivals came late enough that a large share of the enslaved were African born when emancipation came, and the languages, drumming and religious forms they carried survived with less erosion than on islands whose importing had finished a century earlier. A late start in the sugar business produced a different kind of Caribbean society.