Max Albert and I have been reflecting deeply on the autonomy conversation in Tobago, and it has become increasingly clear to us that one of the enduring weaknesses in the discourse is its historical imprecision, especially its constitutional imprecision. Too often, the conversation is not properly centred. Concepts are collapsed, eras are merged, and constitutional experiences separated by rupture are treated as if they form one continuous historical line. This, in our respectful view, is an error.
For Tobago’s autonomy journey to be properly understood, it must be divided into two constitutional eras. The first era may properly be called Plantocratic Autonomy, and the second Democratic Constitutional Autonomy.
They are not the same. They are separated by constitutional rupture. And unless that rupture is properly understood, Tobago’s modern autonomy claim risks being historically misframed and philosophically weakened.
The first question, therefore, must be a simple but powerful one: autonomy for whom? It is a question that immediately forces intellectual discipline into the discussion. In the period of British colonial administration, Tobago possessed internal legislative and administrative arrangements under imperial sovereignty. But the internal governing architecture was not autonomy in the modern democratic sense. It was autonomy exercised by the white planter class, for the white planter class, within the larger framework of British imperial rule.
It was, in essence, a white-to-white constitutional arrangement. The Crown remained sovereign. England remained supreme. The local planter elite merely exercised delegated authority under imperial permission.
Its object was not popular government. Its object was plantation management, economic extraction, labour control, and class preservation. That is why we describe it as Plantocratic Autonomy. It was exclusionary by design. It excluded the labouring classes, emancipated Africans, and any notion of democratic participation as we understand it today.
To speak of that period as if it were simply an earlier version of modern Tobago autonomy is therefore to commit a serious historical error. It is to confuse colonial privilege with constitutional democracy.
The second point is equally decisive. At the time of plantocratic self-government, Trinidad and Tobago did not exist as a united constitutional entity.
This is crucial because autonomy, in its modern meaning, presupposes an existing larger constitutional unit from which authority may be devolved. That constitutional condition did not yet exist. And so the modern autonomy question could not have existed in that earlier form.
And then came the rupture.
When Tobago was joined administratively to Trinidad in 1889, following the collapse of sugar and the restructuring of the Crown Colony, the old political order ended. What had existed before was broken. The old legislative autonomy of the planter class was extinguished. The constitutional machinery of separate local systems of governance was absorbed into a new political order. The government buildings remained, but the power did not.
This is what we mean by constitutional rupture. Not continuity but rupture. And with rupture came absorption. On this precise historical point, we must respectfully but firmly part company with Dr Eric Williams and the enduring thesis that Tobago merely exchanged British imperialism for Trinidadian imperialism. We think that this formulation, though rhetorically powerful, is fundamentally imprecise.
Exchange presupposes constitutional continuity in the exchanging subject. But there was no continuity of the white-planter political order in Tobago after administrative merger. Its governing authority ceased. It was not transferred; it was terminated.
What emerged thereafter was not substitution, but a new administrative power centre under a fundamentally different constitutional arrangement. That distinction is critical, for what ended was plantocratic privilege, not democratic Tobago autonomy.
The modern autonomy question, therefore, begins not at exchange, but after rupture. Tobago’s earlier constitutional life was not carried forward intact; it was folded into a wider colonial arrangement under Trinidadian administrative dominance.
This distinction is indispensable. For if the first era ended through rupture and absorption, then the second era must be understood as a new constitutional project, not an inherited continuation.
The modern autonomy movement begins here. It is post-union. It is democratic. It is developmental. And it is people-centred. The work of figures such as James Biggart and ANR Robinson did not seek the restoration of planter privilege. It sought constitutional self-government within the united framework of T&T.
That is a fundamentally different political philosophy. The object of autonomy changed. The beneficiaries changed. The constitutional logic changed. Plantocratic Autonomy sought to preserve land, sugar and the authority of the elites.
Democratic Constitutional Autonomy seeks to preserve identity, development, planning authority, fiscal dignity and institutional self-determination. One was exclusionary. The other is democratic. One was class governance. The other is people-governance.
This distinction matters not merely for academic neatness, but for constitutional strategy. For historical imprecision weakens constitutional arguments. If we cannot distinguish the eras, we risk constructing Tobago’s modern autonomy claim on false continuity rather than constitutional reconstruction. And Tobago’s case deserves better than that.
Dr Winford James is a retired UWI lecturer who has been analysing issues in education, language, development and politics in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean on radio and TV since the 1970s. He has also written thousands of columns for all major newspapers in the country.
