Nineteenth-century West Indian society was pervaded by the racist ideology of local and metropolitan whites, an ideology created, as Donald Wood writes, by ‘the whole intricate experience of the Afro-European encounter since the Renaissance, the stereotypes formed by slavery, the legacy of the master and servant relationship’. The complex of prejudices and judgements which formed the white view of the ‘negro character’ during slavery, a mixture of affection and contempt, patronage and fear, was carried into the period of post-emancipation adjustment. Some of these ideas were modified by developments after 1838; others were to persist virtually unchanged all through the century. Furthermore, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a hardening of racist attitudes on the part of the educated British and European public, directed especially against Africans, and this inevitably helped to shape the views of Europeans and Creole whites in Trinidad.

This was a period when British humanitarianism, so long a dominant influence on official circles, was becoming less sure of itself. The cause of the oppressed peoples of the world, including the ex-slaves and blacks in general, was unpopular with the British public after the 1850s. Blacks had their champions, but the defence was weakening; many overt defences of the African gave way to cultural or racial prejudice on almost every point short of the minimum claim of spiritual equality. Victorian comments about Africans were often outspokenly derogatory. The ‘proverbial indolence’ of the black, as we have seen, was an integral part of nineteenth-century British attitudes to race; the British public tended to contemplate blacks ‘with mild amusement as irresponsible loafers in the sun’.