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Jerome Teelucksingh Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xiii + 235 pp. (Cloth US$ 95.00)
Jerome Teelucksingh contends that labor has been "the most potent force" in the struggle for "liberation from imperial forces and capitalist domination" (p. viii) in Trinidad and Tobago. Accordingly, he focuses on the working class, positing that it laid the foundation for the development of subsequent local nationalist movements and the evolution of working-class struggles from the 1920s to the immediate post-World War II period.
Delineating and scouring this particular phase provided Teelucksingh an opportunity to discuss the crucial role played by the Trinidad Workingmen's Association (twa) and its successor organization, the Trinidad Labor Party (tlp). But the text goes further, discussing in depth the emergence of more radical labor organizations which embroiled themselves in the politics of the postwar period that undergirded nationalist movements globally. This approach, which examines the modus operandi of the incipient and older organizations, establishes the critical nexus between labor and politics that emerged from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. This is not a link that was easily forged. Working-class strugglers and early political reformist groups were neither one and the...