Colonial white elites united in excluding colored and Black middle classes from power

Evidence

And not until the aristocratic French Creoles were thoroughly Anglicized and substantially displaced by British capital and British upper-class families in the late nineteenth century was there any possibility of a whole-hearted reception in that quarter. The British faction (primarily English and Scottish), which during the decline of French Creole sugar fortunes in the mid-century had for a time sought to forcibly Anglicize and subordinate the “foreign” Creoles, had been subdued since Governor Gordon’s regime in the late 1860s. They were content to leave the settling in of the white hierarchy to time. But despite their differences, the white elite held the line on two matters. The first involved representative government. The elite would raise this issue on those occasions when their more aggressive ambitions were thwarted by the crown’s executive or by the British Parliament. The Water Riot of 1903 and the troubles simultaneous to the First World War were just such occasions. The second was the colored and Black middle classes, a presence increasingly difficult to ignore. They “represented a greater threat to continued white control of the society [than the black and Indian masses], even though their numbers were relatively few; they held the key to the political and social future of Trinidad, and some far-seeing Trinidadians realised it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1156

Categorization

• XREF: The white elite’s fear that the colored middle class, not the masses, threatened white control is central to James’s biography and to the broader question of where the radical tradition’s leadership emerges.