Trinidad and Tobago Colony

A colony Britain acquired already populated by other Europeans, which is why it never resembled its neighbours. Spain held Trinidad for three centuries without developing it, and in 1783 issued the Cedula of Population offering land to any Catholic settler who would come - which brought French planters from the other islands with the people they enslaved. Britain took the island in 1797 and inherited a Spanish colony with a French-speaking planter class, Catholic institutions and Spanish law, and governed it as a Crown colony without an elected assembly for well over a century, partly because London did not trust the population it had acquired. Tobago, conquered and traded repeatedly between the Dutch, French and British, was joined to it administratively only in 1889. After emancipation the estates recruited indentured labour from India between 1845 and 1917, and around a hundred and forty thousand people arrived, changing the colony permanently. Oil production began in 1908, giving it an industrial base no other British Caribbean territory had. The steelpan was invented here in the 1930s and 1940s. Independence came in 1962. Port of Spain was the capital. Trinidad lies about eleven kilometres from Venezuela at the closest point. The Pitch Lake at La Brea supplied asphalt for roads across the empire. Carnival developed from French planter masquerade and the canboulay processions of the freed population. Tobago changed hands more than thirty times before the union, more than almost any territory in the Caribbean. Angostura bitters have been made in Port of Spain since 1875.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration