Historians try to base their findings securely on their evidence, and they know that they have an obligation to examine all the available sources relevant to their topic, to critique them carefully, and to offer interpretations which square with a conscientious reading of those sources. Of course we all recognise that absolute objectivity will forever elude us and that there will always be an element of individual judgement and interpretation. And the postmodernists stress that there are many narratives about a nation’s or a people’s past, and that debate and contestation over the different narratives are inevitable and, in principle, healthy.

Nevertheless, historians do strive for professional integrity in the sense that they don’t generally make assertions in their work which can’t be backed by reasonably credible evidence. And one of their professional obligations is to question ‘myths’ about the past—narratives which are lodged in the popular understanding of the national or regional history, but are not firmly based on a reasonable interpretation of the relevant sources. Every nation develops its myths, its national epics, and these stories may have a useful function for nation-building in the positive sense of that term. There are other myths, however, which serve the interests of particular groups as they construct their own narratives of the past and may be less positive in their implications.

One long-standing myth about Trinidad’s history is the idea that slavery here was mild, benign, and paternalist, different in essential ways from slavery elsewhere in the region. Part of what I call the ‘French Creole’ narrative of Trinidad’s past, the argument goes that humane Spanish traditions of slave management, and paternalistic French/French Creole planters living close to their enslaved workforce, ensured that the treatment of the enslaved Africans was generally benevolent. But in fact Spanish legislation on slavery was never really implemented in Trinidad, and the traditions of slave management which were dominant from the 1780s onward were not Spanish but French, specifically Martiniquan, which were by no stretch of the imagination ‘mild’. Combined with French hysteria about a second Haiti after the great rebellion there in the 1790s, these traditions ensured that torture, mutilation and atrocious forms of execution were all used as terror devices to keep the enslaved under control. Mortality rates among Trinidad slaves were high, and as elsewhere in the British Caribbean, our enslaved population declined significantly after the end of the slave trade, as births fell far below deaths.

There were significant differences in the Trinidad slave experience – in particular that African slavery was important for only a relatively short period, between the 1780s and the 1830s – but there is no evidence that it was especially mild, and a great deal of evidence that it was as rigorous and harsh as in Martinique. (In Tobago, a classic slave and sugar economy from the 1760s, slavery was as brutal as anywhere in the region and the rate of population decline after the end of the slave trade was higher than anywhere else in the British Caribbean.) The ‘mild slavery’ notion, in fact, is a classic myth, an important part of the French Creole narrative, itself a ruling-class narrative constructed by the group which dominated the development of a plantation economy here. It still surfaces in some historical accounts today. An echo of it can be found in the sign at the Count Lopinot house, which implies that the Count and his loyal slaves were a big happy family when they ‘found’ the valley and created an estate there – not a hint that these enslaved people were forcibly removed from Ste Domingue after the rebellion there, taken without consent to Trinidad, cut off from kin and friends and denied the chance of freedom in a liberated Haiti.

Another enduring myth is the idea that, while ex-slaves received no land or money at the time of emancipation, ex-indentured Indians all received free land, and were thus enabled to become landowners through government grants. In fact, the ‘land commutation scheme’, as it was called, lasted for a very short time (1869-80), and relatively few Indians were given grants under it, generally of remote or poor quality lands. The great majority of ex-indentureds who acquired lands bought them, either from the Crown (along with many of other ethnicities), or on the private market. Yet the myth that all Indians got free land persists, feeding an Afrocentric narrative of dispossession and discrimination – which was especially salient when the UNC was in power.

There is, of course, an Indocentric narrative too; and one aspect of it is the notion that virtually every Indian immigrant who came to Trinidad was tricked, or kidnapped, by the recruiters; if not actually forced into the Calcutta depot, they were fooled by false promises, they had no idea what they were getting into or where they were going. While this was certainly the case for some, perhaps for many, the indentured immigration scheme lasted for over 70 years, and nearly all the recruits came from the same general area of India. People returned every year, and it is hard to imagine that the truth about conditions under indenture, the distance of Trinidad from India, the length and hardships of the voyage, did not circulate freely in the villages and districts from which the indentureds came – including the truth about the ‘penal sanctions’ enforcing the indenture contract (which was not explained to the recruits at the Calcutta depot). For many, probably most, a choice was made – a choice imposed by poverty, landlessness, the destruction of industries by British trade policies, caste or gender oppression, yes, but a rational choice nevertheless, no different in many ways from the choices made by millions of Europeans in the same period to escape poverty and oppression by migrating to the New World. But it seems easier to see all the ancestors as passive victims, tricked or kidnapped, than as persons who made a difficult decision to leave family and village behind in a risky journey to the Caribbean – to abandon Mother India.

Yet another myth in our history, in my view, is the notion that slavery and indenture were essentially the same: that indenture was merely ‘a new system of slavery’, to use the title of an influential book. Both were systems of coerced or unfree labour but critical differences meant that the experiences of the two sets of victims were not truly comparable. After a defined period of contractual service, the Indian immigrant became free of his indenture, and he could opt for repatriation after ten years, without cost, or (later) partially subsidised. Indenture was not hereditary; if you arrived as a child you were not indentured, and nor were the locally-born children of immigrants. Wages were paid; there was no legal or officially sanctioned physical brutalisation; there was a functioning protective apparatus, despite its many weaknesses. Within limits, cultural and religious practices were tolerated, and family life enjoyed some protection; there was certainly far less sexual abuse of women by estate staff than in slavery. Some contacts with India were maintained, and at least a third of all the immigrants did take up their right of repatriation. There is no question that slavery was far more oppressive than indenture, especially before the last decade (1824-34) when some rather feeble ‘ameliorative’ reforms were made. Enslaved people were property with a status in law and custom hardly above that of the livestock who, like them, were valuable capital possessions listed together with the human chattels on plantation inventories.

One can appreciate, perhaps, the idea of ‘equality of suffering’ which lies behind the myth – we all suffered equally, we can all claim equal rights – but any reasonably objective interpretation of the historical evidence points to the essential differences between slavery and indenture. This is not to say, of course, that an ethnic community should claim superior rights or status on the grounds of greater historic injustices, or prior arrival. It is simply to suggest that myth-making and distorting the historical evidence do not in the long run help anyone.