British rule pushed Trinidad’s black middle classes from prominence to subordination

Evidence

The second of the colored classes, having come into being while Trinidad was under a British colonial order, was never allowed to obtain the prominence of the Romains, Philips, Angernons, Montrichards, Maresses, and the Beaubruns of the first (which P. G. L. Borde, the French Creole historian, had described as having “formed a second society parallel to the first; and no less distinguished than it”). In British Trinidad, the colored and Black middle classes had fallen from their previous heights, ceasing to be able to claim a share in the island’s upper classes: Probably a majority of educated black and coloured men in this period were civil servants. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1159

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Trinidad’s colored and Black middle classes alone remained discontent despite prosperity (similarity 0.84)
• Trinidad’s black middle class split into old French-Creole families and self-made arrivals (similarity 0.83)
• Trinidad’s Black middle class mimicked white hierarchy yet faced an absolute caste ceiling (similarity 0.82)
• Trinidad’s color hierarchy measured privilege in gradations finer than race (similarity 0.82)
• British colonial rule confined educated Black Trinidadians mainly to civil-service posts (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial education made deracination the price of Black middle-class status (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial white elites united in excluding colored and Black middle classes from power (similarity 0.80)
• Black lower-class culture functioned as political resistance through moral rejection of bourgeois colonial norms. (similarity 0.79)