“The Mixture of Nations”: Africans, Creoles, and the Evolving Slave Society of 19th-Century Trinidad

Following Great Britain’s 1797 conquest of Trinidad, the formerly peripheral Spanish colony served for a few brief years as a key site of the transatlantic slave trade: in the decade between 1797 and Great Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, 84 English slaving voyages trafficked a total of 20,000 enslaved Africans to the 1,800 square mile island.^[1] These survivors of the Middle Passage significantly enlarged and diversified Trinidad’s existing population of 10,000 enslaved people, most of whom had arrived in Trinidad not from West Africa, but via regional trafficking or with planters from neighboring Caribbean islands who were enticed to the sparsely-populated colony in the late 18^th century.^[2]

This paper draws on SlaveVoyages, Slave Registries, colonial correspondence, planter testimonies, and Protector of Slaves Reports to explore how Trinidad’s incorporation into the British Empire turned the island into a site of encounter and exchange for enslaved Africans and Creoles. By the time that a comprehensive Slave Registry was first made in Trinidad in 1813, the island’s enslaved population had grown to more than 25,000 people. While planters worried about the effects of this “mixture of Nations,” a re-reading of the colonial archive sheds light on how enslaved Africans and Creoles encountered one another, forged new cultural and linguistic practices, and drew on these practices to survive the island’s transition to sugar production.^[3] Focusing on Trinidad’s emergence as a new node in existing Atlantic circuits provides an opportunity to reflect on how the evolving geography of the British empire affected enslaved people.

[1] https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/9d90a666

[2] In the 100 years prior to British conquest, slavers trafficked a total of 3,456 captives from Africa directly to Trinidad https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/20919f6a

[3] TNA CO 295/66 pg. 34, testimony of Antoine Victoire St. Bresson Esq., Tuesday 11th Jan 1825.