The Settlement gallery possesses numerous artifacts representative of this colonial past. This gallery seeks to define the Caribbean through its historical, political, and geographical attributes. In that, it depicts a collection of deeply shared historical roots between those of the past and present civilizations. It contains artifacts, articles, and pictures of Caribbean ancestry from the Amerindians, Spanish, French, British, Africans, East Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese. Through revisionism, which is where historians offer a new version of history based on detailed evidence, we can use these artifacts, and articles to give us insight into versions of our history that was not previously unearthed or told. These articles and artifacts are important for the awareness, and an unbiased understanding of the ethnocentric perspectives, which is the evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture, previously promulgated by those of our colonial past.  

 

The following is a short video covering a summary of the history of the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago. 

Each country is simultaneously segregated, and unified by varying perspectives of the definition of the Caribbean. For example, a shared colonial past unifies these countries, and they all would be considered ‘Caribbean’ if defined historically, while these same countries are separated by their cultural diversity, and therefore would not be considered as part of the Caribbean if solely defined culturally. Additionally, if we define the Caribbean solely using a political definition, it is difficult to include all Puerto Rico, St. Martin, Guyana, and Mexico due to Puerto Rico being an associated state, this is, not being an independent country such as Guyana, but enjoying all the rights and privileges of the country that governs it.  

 

The first commercial production of sugar occurred in 1550 by the Portuguese through sharecropping, which is where the owner leased his land to a number of small planters, and in return they give him a percentage of their crops harvested. The sugar industry greatly expanded rapidly, and by 1612, an influx of enslaved persons was being brought to Brazil to work on the sugar fields, therefore, production was booming. The weakening of the non-sugar industry in the creation of the Caribbean economy in the early seventeenth century deeply impacted the economy as it allowed for other options to be explored, such as finding sugar to replace the weakening demand for crops such as tobacco and cotton, while perpetuating the affairs of slavery, by bringing more enslaved persons to the Caribbean to work on the fields. 

Plantation owners mainly influenced the passage of laws to control these ex-slaves. An example of the laws they created were that it was illegal for apprentices to leave the plantation during their free time without written permission from their owners. Hence, they still held the majority of control over the workers on their plantations. The punishments endured under slavery were also still being used during the apprenticeship period, such as the flogging of women, which only ended in 1837. The owners also sought to charge high prices for food, and shelter so that enslaved persons would have to work overtime in order to afford their living spaces, therefore increasing production.