Trinidad and Tobago has produced many outstanding scholars, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century:footnote¹ Sylvester Williams, usually described as the father of Pan Africanism; George Padmore, author of Pan Africanism or Communism?, among other titles, and another prominent member of the activists in Pan Africanism;footnote² Eugene Chen, twice minister for foreign affairs in the Nationalist government of China under Sun Yat-sen;footnote³ Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 to 1981 and author of Capitalism and Slavery; Oliver Cromwell Cox, author of Caste, Class and Race; C.L.R. James and others. As J.R. Hooker, author of Henry Sylvester Williams, remarked: ‘That Trinidad has produced a disproportionate number of unusual men is a truism; that so many of them have been forgotten is a scandal. Any small island capable of launching an Eric Williams, a C.L.R. James, a George Padmore, a Vidia Naipaul, to mention a few whose reputations are secure, requires attention.’footnote⁴ Were he writing in 1996 he would have had to include Arnold Rampersad, author of The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Life of Langston Hughes. These exemplary talents did not drop from the sky. Rather, they were products of a nineteenth-century intellectual formation that has not been given due attention. We shall see that James was aware of this formation and acknowledged his intellectual debt. As he said in one of his many tributes to George Padmore, ‘The longer I live, the more I see that people are shaped to a degree that they do not yet understand by the social relations and family and other groups in which they grew up.’footnote⁵

Born in 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad in 1901, James grew up within a five-mile radius of the homes of Sylvester Williams and Padmore.footnote⁶ Indeed, James’s and Padmore’s fathers were friends, and well-known principals at local primary schools in the island.footnote⁷ In later life James wrote about the achievements of these intellectuals and, by inference, their effect on his own development. Thus, in writing about Michel Maxwell Philip, one of the most distinguished nineteenth-century scholars, James noted:

Mr. Philip was not radically active because it was not his temperament to be so. His praise of Mr. Reeves [attorney general of Barbados]. . .shows that his heart was in the right place. But this sketch has been written in vain if Creoles do not see that Maxwell Philip’s memory is to be treasured for other reasons. True he was a distinguished lawyer, but Trinidad has had her fair share of such. He is to be remembered too as a man of conspicuous public service. But even here he is not unique. Rather his chief claim to remembrance is because in addition to all these things, he was a man of that varied intellectual power and breadth of culture which make him and such as he the fine flower of a civilized society.footnote⁸

James might have been speaking of himself. Thirty-eight years later he proudly announced that he did not learn literature ‘from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilization. That is where I have come from, and I would not pretend to be anything else.’ Thus he affirmed that the ‘origins of my work and my thoughts are to be found in Western European literature, Western European history and Western European thought.’footnote⁹ This is a large claim, but James was certain of the sources of his intellectual ideas and the work of those in the Caribbean who went before him. He understood this tradition long before any of his contemporaries did. Thus it is to this somewhat silent and unexplored tradition that we should turn to understand the foundation—perhaps ‘groundation’ as the Rastas would say—of the intellectual origins of twentieth-century Trinidadian and, by extension, Caribbean intellectual thought. As James acknowledged, he was not unique nor was he part of a tradition that was confined to Trinidad. His was part of a larger Caribbean experience, as is affirmed by the examples of Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Grantley Adams of Barbados. James was the product of an exemplary tradition, one that I outline by examining the works of three important Trinidadian scholars of the nineteenth century: Jean-Baptiste Philippe, Michel Maxwell Philip, and J.J. Thomas.

The first thirty-four years of the nineteenth century were certainly a horrendous time for slaves and free people of colour alike. They marked the last years of slavery, and the attempt of slaves and free people of colour to articulate concepts of freedom. Jean-Baptiste Philippe, a coloured physician, in penning Free Mulatto, his address to Lord Bathurst, the British secretary of state for the colonies, inaugurated an intellectual and literary tradition that would have an important impact on the scholars and intellectuals who followed.footnote¹⁰ Although located within the island’s social and political environment, Free Mulatto drew on the concepts of the Enlightenment ideal, displaying Philippe’s knowledge of the French essayists and pamphleteers of the previous century.

A disquisition about the coloured people of Trinidad during the slave era, Free Mulatto explores ‘the nature of man and of his response to this environment and his own conscience’. Free Mulatto, the embodiment of the collective response of the coloured community to the pressures brought against them by the English, also reflected the culmination of what Carl Campbell called ‘the politics of private discussion’ and ‘the quiet collection of signatures’. Moreover, it chronicled the ‘sunk and mortifying conditions to which they [the coloureds] have been degraded by the illiberal prejudices of the whites, publicly countenanced as they have been by the illegal proceedings of some of their successive governors.’ The text is the work of a ‘progressive-minded intellectual’ who considers the coloured subject ‘as a social being’ and ‘points to a theoretical solution of the problems of the age [that] could be comprehended within it.’footnote¹¹ Using the pamphlet, the preferred literary style of the eminent prose writers of the age and his fellow coloured patriots, Philippe expressed his dissatisfaction with the conditions of his people.footnote¹² Moreover, if we see literature as one aspect of ‘the general history of ideas’ and accept the notion that ‘the writer and the specialist often merge to take on the appearance of a superior kind of journalism’ within the philosophe, then it can be asserted that this eloquent piece of philosophical journalism stands at the entrance of Trinidad and Tobago’s literary and philosophical engagement with the world, and constitutes the first sustained indigenous literary essay of the tradition.

Although James began his career as a schoolteacher and a contributor to literary journals in Trinidad in the later 1920s and early 1930s (he left Trinidad in 1932), during his early stay in London he supported himself as a journalist.footnote¹³ His first extended essay, The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932), a pioneering political biography, turned out to be nothing more than an extended journalistic exercise that raised similar concerns about the welfare of his fellow-citizens as those of Jean-Baptiste Philippe. James was concerned with issues of self-government, Philippe concerned himself with the denial of basic freedoms for the free coloured inhabitants of the island. Like Philippe, as James grew more acquainted with Western ideas he would draw on Enlightenment sources to define his approach to politics and philosophy. Yet, from the inception of his intellectual career—that is, from his first extended non-fictional work—James is imbued with the idea that Caribbean people are firmly embedded in the Western tradition of intellectual thought: