It's always an event when Michael Anthony launches another of his books on the history of the nation, and this one has been in the making for a long time. It is a welcome addition to our stock of works on the modern history of T&T. This book deals with the period 1900 to 1925 (and as it's called Volume 1, we are clearly promised additional installments to cover the whole century). It has no fewer than 87 chapters, most of them quite short, and many interesting illustrations. It's a long book, nearly 400 pages long, but the brief chapters make it quite easy to read. As always, Michael's style of writing is reader-friendly, simple and lively. (Unlike quite a lot of academic historical writing!) It's not for nothing that he is both historian and best-selling novelist.
The book is organised chronologically, with each year given three or four chapters, depending on what was happening. In a way it is like a reference book, or an historical dictionary for the period, where one can look up specific events happening in each year. (Of course Michael has already published the very valuable Historical Dictionary of T&T, so this book can also be seen as a sort of more detailed supplement for a particular period.) It is also very much a book for browsing and for dipping into. As sources for this well-researched book, Michael has leant heavily on the local newspapers of the day, government reports and publications, Hansard and the census reports. He has also used his own many books as sources–and remember you're allowed to plagiarise from your own books! What kinds of topics are covered in the book? It would be easier to list what topics are not, and that would be a very brief list. Michael casts a very wide net and deals with happenings in the realm of political, economic, social and cultural history. There is a lot of information about political life, municipal government, sports, cultural events, Carnival, transport, the sugar, cocoa and oil industries, crime and punishment...and much more. For some reason Mayaro appears frequently in the book! This is a truly comprehensive chronological history of the first quarter of the last century.
Now Michael doesn't say this, but in my view, the overall theme of the book is the coming of modernity to T&T. By modernity we mean the technology and the life-style of the 'modern', urban, industrialised West, the product of the Industrial Revolution which began in Britain in the late 18th century and spread widely throughout the 19th. As a fairly prosperous British colony, T&T shared in this modernity, and the book illustrates how what's often called the second Industrial Revolution, of the later 19th century, was brought to the islands (well, Trinidad really –Tobago was neglected as usual) in the first part of the 20th century. The ways that modernity manifested itself in the colony included the development of the oil industry–a big theme in the book–the spread of electricity and the telephone service, the coming of the radio and the cinema (silent movies), the exciting arrival of planes from 1913 on, and above all: the coming of the car and the motor bus. (The railways had arrived earlier on, in the 1870s and 1880s, though there were extensions opened up after 1900.)
Michael Anthony, sixth from right, with a group of attendees after the book launch.
In fact, to me, one of the valuable things about the book is the coverage given to developments in transportation. Now this is a topic which is often neglected in national histories, because it doesn't seem to fit into the genres of political, social or even economic history very neatly. Michael gives us a great deal of information about the railways and their use, the urban electric tramway, the roads, the gradual shift from animal-drawn transport to the motor car and bus, fuelled of course by oil. He also interestingly analyses the social effects of these developments. For instance, the coming of motor bus transport (well underway by the early 1920s) connected villages and towns and helped to end the rural isolation of the more remote settlements which had not been on the railway routes. He notes that the new buses, plus the railway, made it possible for thousands to come to Port-of-Spain to see the Carnivall–ironically speeding up the decline of local Carnivals in the smaller villages in the rural districts. While back in the mid-19th century a trip to town might be a very rare event for the rural person, or indeed it might never happen, by 1920 the bus and the train had transformed the situation. Trinidad was becoming what it is today, basically a single 'city-state'. Not so in Tobago, but even there, a regular bus service between Scarborough and Roxborough began in 1922.
And the book chronicles the arrival and spread of THE iconic 20th-century transportation device, the motor car. As a few were imported by affluent locals from the very early 1900s, the authorities struggled to keep up–gradually deciding what side to drive on, bringing in licences and licence plates, legislating rules for the road, speed limits and tests for drivers' permits. Inexorably the numbers of cars increased year by year. Michael chronicles the first fatal road accidents and the steadily increasing mayhem on the roads. Of course the spread of the car forced the government to invest in road improvements and new routes. By the mid-1920s the bus and the car and the motor taxi were all well established–eventually to spell doom for the trams and, much later, the trains. I've focused on transportation because it is an important theme in this book, a theme which is often neglected in other works on T&T's history. But there are many, many other topics of great interest and importance crowding the pages of Michael's latest book. It is a valuable addition to the research and writing on the national history and should be welcomed by all with an interest in our past. Let's hope Volume 2 is not far behind.
Bridget Brereton
