Merchant wartime profiteering inflated prices and triggered West Indian strikes

Evidence

But the advent of the Great War had brought to the fore a more considerable and mean enemy of colonial interests: … [N]ot everyone was prepared to make sacrifices for the general good. The colony’s merchants saw the start of the war in Europe as a signal for an immediate increase in prices. On the very day of the government’s announcement that the war had started in Europe, The Port of Spain Gazette reported that prices had risen steeply. … This inflation of prices broke the backs of the Black working class in the island’s cash economy, and was the primary cause of the strikes that followed: oil workers struck in 1917, railworkers, scavengers, stevedores, sweepers, sugar, and dock workers in 1919, asphalt and railworkers again in 1920. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1186

Categorization

• QUESTION: War inflation as a trigger for Caribbean working-class radicalization is a datum worth chasing — how does price gouging fuel anti-colonial politics elsewhere?
• XREF: connects to: Italy’s 1919 inflation triggered nationwide food riots against war profiteers — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 261