On 18 February 1797, British forces captured Trinidad after Spanish Governor José María Chacón capitulated at Valsayn. The change of imperial ruler did not free the people held in slavery or dismantle plantation production. British authorities inherited and expanded a society built through the Cedula-era influx of settlers, enslaved Africans and land grants. The transfer shows how European conflict redrew colonial control while enslaved people remained treated as property and continued to sustain the island’s plantation economy.
On 7 June 1771, 38 of the 42 enslaved people at Bloody Bay Estate in Tobago escaped and established a maroon settlement in the surrounding hills. Their flight was a collective refusal of plantation...
Royal instructions dated 3 September 1776 to Trinidad governor Manuel Fálquez set out measures to encourage population and trade. The instructions prefigured later Spanish efforts to attract foreign...
On 29 April 1780, Governor Martin de Salaverría authorized Philippe-Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent to travel to French Caribbean islands and invite French and Irish residents to settle in Trinidad. The...
On 5 June 1781, Tobago’s British lieutenant governor George Ferguson agreed to French terms of surrender after French forces invaded the island. Tobago was a British colony built around plantation...
On 24 November 1783, Spain issued the Cedula of Population, opening Trinidad to immigration by Roman Catholic settlers from Spain’s allied nations, particularly French Caribbean colonies. Land grants,...
👉 British forces capture Trinidad from Spain
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18 February 1797
On 18 February 1797, British forces captured Trinidad after Spanish Governor José María Chacón capitulated at Valsayn. The change of imperial ruler did not free the people held in slavery or dismantle...
On 25 March 1802, the Treaty of Amiens formally left Trinidad in British hands, excepting it from the return of other Spanish and allied colonies occupied during the war. The treaty settled a...
On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The act prohibited British participation in the transatlantic slave trade, but it did not abolish...
On 14 May 1811, Britain enacted legislation to make the 1807 trade ban more effective, prohibiting the movement of enslaved people into British colonies from foreign territories and between...
On 26 March 1812, an Order in Council established compulsory registration of enslaved people in Trinidad, the first such registry in the British West Indies. Plantation owners had to report enslaved...
On 12 July 1819, Parliament created a central Registry of Colonial Slaves in Britain to receive copies of registers sent from the colonies and to regulate the removal of enslaved people between...
