Post-emancipation Trinidad could not replenish plantation labor from nearby Black sources

Evidence

There were three possible sources of immigrant labor that were immediately at hand: the other islands of the West Indies; the free Negroes of the United States; and the Africans liberated by the Royal Navy from “illegal” slave ships along the West African coast. None of these sources, however, proved sufficient. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1142