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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2025
Much of the history of Indian businesses and merchants outside the subcontinent has emphasized the role of specific trading groups that created and utilized ties with India. The rise of Trinidad’s Indian shopkeepers tells an alternative story: former labor migrants turned to commerce. Indentured labor formed the connection between India and Trinidad, an area outside traditional Indian merchant activity. Trinidad’s organic Indian business community arose owing to the absence of traditional trading groups in the immigrant population, the large distance from India, and the growth of the Indian population that in turn demanded services. Shopkeepers came disproportionately from upper castes, who possibly relied on their greater social status and new network ties in Trinidad. However, shopkeepers did not rise into the upper echelons of commerce. This break shows the limits of traditional Indian traders in establishing ties in the farthest reaches of the British Empire.
I thank staff at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, especially Mrs. Avalon Dougan, Ms. Janelle Duke, and Mrs. Roma Wong Sang, and library staff at the University of Richmond for assistance in locating records. I thank Ajin John, Mitch Larson, Rebekah McCallum, Simon Mollan, Nicky Tynan, PV Vishwanath, and participants at the 2022 Economic and Business History Society Conference for feedback on this project. Walter Friedman and several reviewers have helped craft this article. The University of Michigan provided financial support through the Michigan Institute for Teaching and Research in Economics (MITRE) and the Rackham Graduate School.
1 For an overview, see Claude Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks Outside India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: a Preliminary Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (1999): 883–911; Alexander Persaud, “Indian Merchant Migration within the British Empire,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2020).
2 Scott Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900 (Brill, 2002); Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2007).
3 Henry W. Lofty, Report on the Census of Barbados (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1921), 88.
4 Peter Hanoomansingh, “Beyond Profit and Capital: The Sindhis and Gujaratis of Barbados” in Entrepreneurship in the Caribbean, eds. Selwyn Ryan and Lou Anne Barclay (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, 1992), 306–309, 316–318.
5 Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks,” 905.
6 “Nieuwe handelszaak,” De West, 24 Aug. 1936, accessed 23 Oct. 2022, https://www.kirpalani.com/en/about-us.
7 Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge, 2000); Nayan Shah, “Intimate Dependency, Race, and Trans-Imperial Migration” in The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power, ed. Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery (New York, 2013), 25-49; Government of India Home Department, “Grant of Passport Facilities” (National Archives of India PR-000003036063, 1936). For more on the Panama Canal, see Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, “What TR Took: The Economic Impact of the Panama Canal, 1903–1937,” Journal of Economic History 68, no. 3 (2008): 686–721; George W. Westerman, “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama,” Phylon 22, no. 4 (1961): 340–350.
8 Trinidad and Tobago were joined as a unitary colony in 1888. However, indentured laborers only went to Trinidad, and Tobago’s Indian population after the union was and has remained very small.
9 Chinmay Tumbe, “Transnational Indian Business in the Twentieth Century,” Business History Review 91, no. 4 (2017): 651–679.
10 Mark Casson, The Entrepreneur: an Economic Theory (Oxford, UK, 1982).
11 See Hagen Koo, “Small Entrepreneurship in a Developing Society: Patterns of Labor Absorption and Social Mobility,” Social Forces 54, no. 4 (1976): 775–787.
12 John N. Ingham, “Building Businesses, Creating Communities: Residential Segregation and the Growth of African American Business in Southern Cities, 1880–1915,” Business History Review 77, no. 4 (2003): 639–665.
13 Lomarsh Roopnarine, “The Repatriation, Readjustment, and Second-Term Migration of Ex-Indentured Indian Laborers from British Guiana and Trinidad to India, 1838–1955,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 83, no. 1–2 (2009): 71–97. For the importance of trust generally in indentureship, see Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Trust in the Indian Labour Diaspora,” Journal of Migration History 7, no. 2 (2021): 143–169.
14 For trust in trade, see Avner Greif, “Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition,” The American Economic Review (1993): 525–548; Janet T. Landa, Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange (Ann Arbor, 1994). Recent examples include Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA, 2014); Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks (Woodbridge, UK, 2013).
15 Several recent examples from East Africa include Gijsbert Oonk, Settled Strangers: Asian Business Elites in East Africa (1800–2000) (London, 2013); Katie Valliere Streit, “South Asian Entrepreneurs in the Automotive Age: Negotiating a Place of Belonging in Colonial and Post-colonial Tanzania,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 13, no. 3 (2019): 525–545; Tumbe, “Transnational Indian Business.”
16 Although all indentured laborers came with few assets per se, upper castes possessed greater social status and perhaps human capital, which accords with Vincenzo Quadrini, “Entrepreneurship, Saving, and Social Mobility,” Review of Economic Dynamics 3, no. 1 (2000): 1–40.
17 B. W. Higman and Kathleen EA Monteith, “West Indian Business History: Scale and Scope,” in West Indian Business History: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, ed. B. W. Higman and Kathleen E. A. Monteith (Kingston, Jamaica, 2010), 3; Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: a Regional Geography (Cambridge, UK, 1992). Two recent examples of business research on earlier periods include Albane Forestier, “Risk, Kinship and Personal Relationships in Late Eighteenth-Century West Indian Trade: The Commercial Network of Tobin & Pinney,” Business History 52, no. 6 (2010): 912–931; Aaron Graham, “Slavery, Capitalism, Incorporation and the Close Harbour Company of Jamaica, circa 1800,” Business History 63, no. 5 (2019): 705–726.
18 For general examples, see Marianne Ramesar, “The Impact of the Indian Immigrants on Colonial Trinidad Society,” Caribbean Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1976): 5–18; Viranjini P. Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca, NY, 2001). For a detailed study of Indians in agriculture, see Karen S. Dhanda, “Indentured Labor and the Integration of Trinidad into the World Economy” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2000). Education examples include Brinsley Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian Mission as an Agent of Integration in Trinidad during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 14, no. 4 (1975): 41–55; Rosabelle Seesaran, From Caste to Class: Social Mobility of the Indo-Trinidadian Community 1870–1917 (Trinidad and Tobago, 2002); Jean-Claude Escalante, From Indentureship to Entrepreneurship: the Rise of the East Indian Peasantry in Trinidad (San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago, 2021). An exception comes from Dave Ramsaran, Breaking the Bonds of Indentureship: Indo-Trinidadians in Business (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, 1993). For a recent example of work on post-independence economic outcomes, see Monique D. A. Kelly, “The Changing Terrain of Racial Inequality in Trinidad and Tobago,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 86 (2023): 100826.
19 Daniel J. Crowley, “Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad,” American Anthropologist 59, no. 5 (1957): 817–824; Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Toronto, 1972); Bridget Brereton, Race relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900 (Cambridge, UK, 1979); Kelvin Singh, Race and Class: Struggles in a Colonial State: Trinidad 1917–1945 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1994); Kelvin Singh, “Conflict and Collaboration: Tradition and Modernizing Indo-Trinidadian Elites (1917–56),” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 70, no. 3–4 (1996): 229–253.
20 For the major initial work on this, see Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review (1973): 583–594. Examples on Chinese immigration include Howard Johnson, “The Chinese in Trinidad in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 10, no. 1 (1987): 82–95; Walton Look Lai, “The Chinese of Trinidad and Tobago: Mobility, Modernity, and Assimilation during and after Colonialism” in Chinese Transnational Networks, ed. Chee-Beng Tan (New York, 2007), 191-210; Jacqueline Levy, “The Economic Role of the Chinese in Jamaica: the Grocery Retail Trade,” Jamaican Historical Review 15 (1986): 31–49; Andrew W. Lind, “Adjustment Patterns among the Jamaican Chinese,” Social and Economic Studies 7 no. 2 (1958): 144–164. For more on Syrian-Lebanese migration, see David Nicholls, “Lebanese of the Antilles: Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad” in The Lebanese in the World: a Century of Emigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (London, 1992), 339-360; Lou Anne Barclay, “The Syrian Lebanese Community in Trinidad & Tobago: a Preliminary Study of a Commercial Ethnic Minority” in Entrepreneurship in the Caribbean: Culture, Structure, Conjecture, ed. Selwyn Ryan and Taimoon Stewart (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, 1994), 202-226. For the Portuguese, see Robert Ciski, The Vincentian Portuguese: a Study in Ethnic Group Adaptation (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1975); JoAnne Ferreira, The Portuguese of Trinidad and Tobago: Portrait of an Ethnic Minority (Kinston, Jamaica, 2018).
21 Cecilia A. Green and Yan Liu, “A ‘Transnational Middleman Minority’ in the Eastern Caribbean? Constructing a Historical and Contemporary Framework of Analysis,” Social and Economic Studies 66, no. 3–4 (2017): 1–31.
22 Gareth Austin, Carlos Dávila and Geoffrey Jones, “The Alternative Business History: Business in Emerging Markets,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 537–569.
23 Linda A. Newson, Aboriginal and Spanish colonial Trinidad: A Study in Culture Contact (London, 1976), 177–183.
24 Gerald C. Friedman, “The Heights of Slaves in Trinidad,” Social Science History 6, no. 4 (1982): 482–515.
25 A. Meredith John, The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783–1816: a Mathematical and Demographic Enquiry (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 40; Friedman, “The Heights of Slaves in Trinidad,” 483.
26 Robert Montgomery Martin, “Trinidad” in Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire in the West Indies, South America, North America, Asia, Austral-Asia, Africa and Europe (London, 1839), 23–35.
27 B. W. Higman, “Population and Labor in the British Caribbean in the Early Nineteenth Century” in Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Chicago, 1986), 608; Martin, “Trinidad.”
28 Martin, “Trinidad”, 27; B. W. Higman, “The Chinese in Trinidad, 1806–1838,” Caribbean Studies 12, no. 3 (1972): 21–44.
29 For the canonical description of this, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, UK, 1985).
30 Edward A. Alpers, “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1800,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (1976): 22–44; Ghulam A. Nadri, “Exploring the Gulf of Kachh: Regional Economy and Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51, no. 3 (2008): 460–86; Richard Pankhurst, “Indian Trade with Ethiopia, the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 14, no. 55 (1974): 453–497; Kaveh Yazdani, “From Western India to Eastern Africa—the Rise of the Parsis in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67, nos. 1–2 (2024): 161–206.
31 Many scholars have studied emancipation and the debate over post-slavery labor. Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1981); Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Oxford, UK, 1995); Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998); Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (New York, 1964); Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition: the Years after Slavery (Oxford, UK, 1968). For more on the rise of indentureship, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, UK, 1995). For the second half of indentureship, see K. O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875–1917 (New York, 1994); Marianne Ramesar, Survivors of Another Crossing: a History of East Indians in Trinidad, 1880–1946 (St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, 1994).
32 There is a large debate about the degree to which indentureship was voluntary. For a recent overview, see Richard B. Allen, “A New System of Slavery at Age Fifty,” Slavery & Abolition 45 (2024): 1–9. See also Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: the Odyssey of Indenture (Oxford, UK, 2016); Brij V. Lal, “Understanding the Indian Indenture Experience,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 21, no. s1 (1998): 215–237; Doug Munro, “The Tinker-Gillion Controversy in Indo-Fijian Indenture Historiography,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 2 (2020): 363–381; Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: the Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830–1920 (Oxford, UK, 1974).
33 Only 4.3% (6,325 of 147,000) came from Madras per the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, “List of the General Registers of Indian Indentured Labourers, 1845–1917.”
34 Tirthankar Roy, “Trading Firms in Colonial India,” Business History Review 88, no. 1 (2014): 9–42.
35 Trinidad Immigration Office, Report on Immigration (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1879–1895); Trinidad Immigration Office, Report of the Protector of Immigrants (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1896–1917). The reports for 1880–1881 and 1895 lack data on paid passengers. Data for 1888 could not be found.
36 For instance, see the Trinidad Immigration Office, Trinidad Immigration Report for 1883, 1.
37 Chandra Jayawardena, “Migration and Social Change: a Survey of Indian Communities Overseas,” Geographical Review 58, no. 3 (1968): 426–49; Adapa Satyanarayana, “Birds of ‘Passage’: Migration of South Indian Laborers to Southeast Asia,” Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 89–115.
38 Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: the Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2015); H. S. Morris, “The Indian Family in Uganda,” American Anthropologist 61, no. 5 (1959): 779–89; Richa Nagar, “The South Asian Diaspora in Tanzania: a History Retold,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 16, no. 2 (1996): 62–80.
39 Martha Spencer Honey, “A History of Indian Merchant Capital and Class Formation in Tanganyika c. 1840–1940.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dar es Salaam, 1982); Joey Power, “Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Anglo-Indian Trade Rivalry in Colonial Malawi, 1910–1945,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 3 (1993): 575–607.
40 John McDonald and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Fares Charged for Transporting Indian Indentured Labour to Mauritius and the West Indies, 1850–1873,” International Journal of Maritime History 3, no. 1 (1991): 81–99.
41 David W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: an Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 1–26.
42 Register of Returned Immigrants, 1869–1897, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago; Annual Report on Indian Immigration to, Indian Emigration from, and Indentured Indian Immigrants in the Colony (Suva, Fiji, 1898), 8.
43 Robert G. Greenhill, “British Shipping and Latin America 1840–1930: the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company” (Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 1971).
44 Indian Immigration, Fiji Legislative Council Paper 48 (1917); Report of the Protector of Indian Immigrants (Durban, Natal, 1911); Report of the Protector of Immigrants for the Year 1917, Trinidad Council Paper 72 (1918).
45 Trinidad Immigration Report for 1871 &c (Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1872).
46 Register of Returned Immigrants, 1869–1897.
47 Census of the Colony of Trinidad and Tobago, 1931 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1933), 32.
48 See notes on Table 3 that disaggregate shopkeepers by sex and birthplace.
49 For labor market outcomes, see Rhoda Reddock, “Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845–1917,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 43 (1985): WS79–WS87; Rhoda Reddock, Women, Labour & Politics in Trinidad & Tobago: a History (Kingston, Jamaica, 1994). For more on earnings and autonomy, see Radica Mahase, “‘The Men Who Controlled Indian Women’—Indentureship, Patriarchy and Women’s ‘Liberation’ in Trinidad” in Women in the Indian Diaspora: Historical Narratives and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Amba Pande (Singapore, 2018), 65-76, and Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad 1917–1947 (New York, 2002). For an example of food stalls, see Sumita Chatterjee, “Indian Women’s Lives and Labor: The Indentureship Experience in Trinidad and Guyana, 1845–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1997), 194. For an example of land, see Shaheeda Hosein, “A Space of Their Own: Indian Women and Land Ownership in Trinidad 1870–1945,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 1 (2007): 1–17.
50 D. W. D. Comins, “Diary” in Notes on Emigration from India to Trinidad (Calcutta, 1893), 12. Note: The main report and diary were printed in the same volume, but pagination restarted for the diary.
51 Census of the Colony of Trinidad and Tobago, 1931, “Abstract H,” 32B; Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks,” 886–887.
52 Census of the Colony of Trinidad, 1891 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1892), Appendix F and Part V; Census of the Colony of Trinidad and Tobago, 1921 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1923), 60, 180.
53 Nishant Batsha, “The Currents of Restless Toil: Colonial Rule and Indian Indentured Labor in Trinidad and Fiji” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2017), 86–108.
54 Toshio Suzuki, “The Rise and Decline of the Oriental Bank Corporation, 1842–84” in The Origins of International Banking in Asia: the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Shizuya Nishimura, Toshio Suzuki and Ranald C. Michie (Oxford, UK, 2012). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646326.003.0004.
55 “Mode of Transmitting Coolie Remittances to India, Report on,” 25 Feb. 1874, NA, Emigration (& Coolie Immigration), CO 384/102.
56 Register of Indian Immigrants’ Remittances to Relations and Friends in India (1885–1891), National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. Money order slips collected large amounts of information on both remitters and recipients. Remitters provided their name, age, indentureship registration number (if applicable), occupation, and address. Remitters provided the name of the recipient—oftentimes including the caste of the recipient at the end—along with relation to the remitter, age, occupation, and location in India. The Register collates these slips.
57 Comins, Notes on Emigration from India to Trinidad.
58 For British Guiana, see Neha Hui and Uma S. Kambhampati, “Between Unfreedoms: the Role of Caste in Decisions to Repatriate among Indentured Workers,” Economic History Review 75, no. 2 (2022): 421–446. For Fiji, see Alexander Persaud, “A (Paid) Passage to India: Migration and Revealed Willingness to Pay for Upper-Caste Status,” Economic Inquiry 61, no. 3 (2023): 652–674.
59 For a summary of changes and persistence in caste, see Narayana Jayaram, “The Metamorphosis of Caste among Trinidad Hindus,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 40, no. 2 (2006): 143–173; Seesaran, From Caste to Class, 114–117, 216. For more on the social modifications to caste and its persistence, including housing quality and spatial segregation in the 1950s, see Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad (New York, 1961); Jagdish C. Jha and R. P. Anand, “Indian Heritage in Trinidad,” India Quarterly 28, no. 4 (1972): 364–379. For disproportionate representation of upper castes in Trinidad’s mid-twentieth-century elites, especially in politics, see Yogendra K. Malik, “Socio-political Perceptions and Attitudes of East Indian Elites in Trinidad,” Western Political Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1970): 552–563. For a contrary view emphasizing disappearance during indentureship, see Brinsley Samaroo, “Chinese and Indian ‘Coolies’ Voyages to the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 14 (2000): 3–24. For disappearance by the 1970s, see Joseph Nevadomsky, “Abandoning the Retentionist Model: Family and Marriage Change among the East Indians in Rural Trinidad,” International Journal of Sociology of the Family 10, no. 2 (1980): 181–197. As noted in Table 4’s notes, only one case akin to Samaroo’s “Brahmins [sic] by boat” appears in the shopkeeper remittances, and Samaroo cites a poem emphasizing upper-caste shop ownership.
60 James Henry Collens, The Trinidad and Tobago Official Commercial Register and Almanack, 1894 (Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1893), 190.
61 James Henry Collens, The Trinidad and Tobago Official Commercial Register and Almanack, 1896 (Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1894), 89.
62 Comins, Notes on Emigration, lxx–lxxiii.
63 For more on the relationship of the Presbyterian Church in Trinidad to Indians, see Samaroo, “The Presbyterian Canadian Mission.”
64 Richard Charan, “Mr Juppy’s Horses,” Trinidad Express, 1 June 2023, accessed 1 Sep. 2023, https://trinidadexpress.com/features/local/mr-juppys-horses/article_70124914–ff4a-11ed-b351–87e873841b8b.html; “Proposed Race Course for San Fernando,” San Fernando Gazette, 14 Jan. 1888, accessed 1 Sep. 2023, https://www.dloc.com/AA00079373/01300/; “Trinidad Bankruptcy Ordinance-1871, In Bankruptcy,” Port of Spain Gazette, 3 Nov. 1899, https://dloc.com/UF00094730/09094/ (accessed 1 August 2024).
65 Comins, “Diary,” 12; Comins, Note on Emigration, 17.
66 Comins, “Diary,” 12.
67 Ramsaran, Breaking the Bonds, 138.
68 Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 277; Lomarsh Roopnarine, “The Other Side of Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Landownership, Remittances and Remigration 1838–1920,” Journal of Caribbean History 42, no. 2 (2008): 205–230.
69 Seesaran, From Caste to Class, 139–141; Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad, 91. For similarities in Mauritius, see Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Sirdars as Intermediaries in Nineteenth-Century Indian Ocean Indentured Labour Migration,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (2017): 462–484.
70 Comins, Note on Emigration, 18; Comins, “Diary,” 11. See prior remittances from passes 36107, 54654, and 62259, which indicate an occupation of sirdar before becoming shopkeepers, part of Emigration Passes of Indian Immigrants, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago.
71 Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 106–107. For an example of such a post-indenture shopkeeper, note genealogist Shamshu Deen’s ancestor in Swaminathan Natarajan, “Teary Reunion of Indians after a Century-Long Separation,” 29 May 2023, accessed 21 July 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65693512.
72 Comins, Note on Emigration, 17; Seesaran, From Caste to Class, 141.
73 For a contemporary look at South Asian shops selling to a diasporic population, see Ahmad Jamal, “Retailing in a Multicultural World: the Interplay of Retailing, Ethnic Identity and Consumption,” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 10, no. 1 (2003): 1–11.
74 Anthony De Verteuil, Eight East Indian Immigrants (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1989), 124.
75 Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 102–103; Radica Mahase, “‘Plenty a Dem Run Away’—Resistance by Indian Indentured Labourers in Trinidad, 1870–1920,” Labor History 49, no. 4 (2008): 465–480; Lomarsh Roopnarine, “Indian Migration during Indentured Servitude in British Guiana and Trinidad, 1850–1920,” Labor History 52, no. 2 (2011): 173–191.
76 Kusha Haraksingh, “Control and Resistance among Overseas Indian Workers: a Study of Labour on the Sugar Plantations of Trinidad, 1875–1917,” Journal of Caribbean History 14 (1981): 1–17; Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore, MD, 1993); John Allen Perry, “A History of the East Indian Indentured Plantation Worker in Trinidad, 1845–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Louisia State University, 1969), 104–110; Marianne Ramesar, “Patterns of Regional Settlement and Economic Activity by Immigrant Groups in Trinidad: 1851–1900,” Social and Economic Studies 25, no. 3 (1976): 187–215; Bonham Richardson, “Plantation Infrastructure and Labor Mobility in Guyana and Trinidad” in Peasants, Primitives, and Proletariats, ed. David L. Browman and Ronald A. Schwarz (The Hague, 1979), 389-406; Roopnarine, “Indian Migration during Indentured Servitude,” 179–184.
77 Census of the Colony of Trinidad, 1891, Part V, Table XXV.
78 Comins, Note on Emigration, 49.
79 Wood, Trinidad in Transition, 158; Seesaran, From Caste to Class, 138–141. For persistence into the mid-twentieth century, Klass, East Indians in Trinidad, 91–92; Kusha Haraksingh, “Sugar, Labour and Livelihood in Trinidad, 1940–1970,” Social and Economic Studies 37, nos. 1–2 (1988): 271–291.
80 See the testimony of two formerly indentured shopkeepers, Boodhoosing and Ramdhun [sic], in the 1884 Hosay riot enquiry for how shopkeepers maintained connections with estates for decades. Government of India Revenue and Agriculture Department, Emigration, “Cooly Riot in Trinidad,” March 1885, National Archives of India, Abhilekh Patal identifier PR_000005006971.
81 This paragraph draws largely on Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900. A similar description appears in Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. For a similar depiction of nearby British Guiana, see Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore, MD, 1981).
82 Government of India Home Department, “Repatriation of Shaik Soleman Mondla to India,” 1937, National Archives of India, Abhilekh Patal identifier PR_000003036374.
83 Report of the Protector of Immigrants for the Year 1939 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1940), 2.
84 “Expanding Passenger Service to Central and South America,” The New York Times (New York), 24 Nov. 1929.
85 Government of India Home Department, “Proposed Repatriation from India to Trinidad of Ramzan His Mother and Son,” 1935, PR_000003034718.
86 Government of India Home Department, “Proposed Repatriation of Ramcharan Mahabir and Nazirali Karimbux from India to British Guiana” (1939–1940), Abhilekh Patal identifier PR_000002022058. The exchange rate used here is 18d./rupee as described by B. P. Adarkar, “The Ratio Question—a Criticism,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960) 3, no. 4 (1938): 373–392. See also B. R. Tomlinson, “Britain and the Indian Currency Crisis, 1930–2,” Economic History Review 32, no. 1 (1979): 88–99.
87 Gordon Pirie, “Incidental tourism: British Imperial air travel in the 1930s,” Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 1 (2009): 49–66.
88 Government of India Home Department, “Proposed Repatriation.”
89 For instance, see Annual Report on Emigration from the Port of Calcutta to British and Foreign Colonies (Calcutta, 1920–22); Leela Gujadhur Sarup, Colonial Emigration 19th, 20th Centuries, vol. 6 (Kolkata, 2007), 353–379.
90 For example, see the salaries of Sebastien Norman Senford, Laurence Park, and James Theophilus in C. B. Franklin, The Trinidad and Tobago Year Book, 1926 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1926), 340–343.
91 Government of India Home Department, “Repatriation from Maracaibo, via Trinidad, of the Destitute Natives of India, Maluk and Jawala Singh,” 1926, Abhilekh Patal identifier PR_000000611704.
92 Government of India Home Department, “Repatriation of Shaik Soleman Mondal.”
93 James Henry Collens, The Trinidad Official and Commercial Register and Almanack (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1895).
94 Annual Report on the Post Office of India for the Year 1902–1903 (Calcutta, 1903), 2.
95 Annual Report on the Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department for the Year 1931–1932 (New Delhi, 1932), 66–67; Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Nyasaland for the Year 1931 (London, 1932), 7. See Table 2 for Trinidad’s population.
96 Klass, East Indians in Trinidad, 53–55; Haraksingh, “Sugar, Labour and Livelihood,” 286–287.
97 The Trinidad and Tobago Year Book, 1924 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1924), 280–289, 311–312.
98 Ramsaran, Breaking the Bonds, 83–84.
99 Colin Clarke and Gilian Clarke, Post-Colonial Trinidad: an Ethnographic Journal (New York, 2010), 194, 214–215, 230.
100 This paragraph draws on data in Murli J. Kirpalani, ed., Indian Centenary Review: One Hundred Years of Progress, 1845–1945 (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1945). Only individuals listed as merchants or shopkeepers are analyzed, though others are listed as having shops ancillary to a profession (e.g., a chemist owning a drugstore).
101 Although the years do not fully align, this contrasts with Markovits’ (1999) claim that only in Mauritius and South Africa were Indian tradespeople mostly locally born in 1930.
102 Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks,” 886–887.
103 Klass, East Indians in Trinidad, 76–77.
104 Clarke and Clarke, Post-colonial Trinidad, 215.
105 Makrand Mehta, “Gujarati Business Communities in East African Diaspora: Major Historical Trends,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 20 (2001): 1738–1747; Vishnu Padayachee and Robert Morrell, “Indian merchants and Dukawallahs in the Natal Economy, c1875–1914,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 1 (1991): 71–102; Goolam Vahed, “Passengers, Partnerships, and Promissory Notes: Gujarati Traders in Colonial Natal, 1870–1920,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 449–479.
106 Kamal Kant Prasad, “The Gujaratis of Fiji, 1900–1945: a Study of an Indian Immigrant Trader Community” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1978).
107 Only four of San Fernando’s 27 Indian stores were owned by Indian-born proprietors in the early 1960s per Clarke and Clarke, Post-Colonial Trinidad, 215.
108 Census of the Colony of Trinidad, 1891, Appendix F and Part IX.
109 Census of the Colony of Trinidad, 1921, 12. The 108 consisted of 85 men and 23 women.
110 For costs, see Stacy D. Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: the First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908–1925 (Oxford, UK, 2019), 22. For more on Syrian-Lebanese migration to Trinidad, see Nicholls, “Lebanese of the Antilles.”
111 Singh, Race and Class, 101–110.
112 Comins, “Diary,” 12; Seesaran, From Caste to Class, 138; Haraksingh, “Sugar, Labour and Livelihood,” 290, note 4, indicates that information about village shops in the mid-twentieth century came from unstructured oral interviews and casual conversations rather than an examination of ledgers, records, etc.