ABSTRACT
Ten years after the British took over the island of Trinidad, the first British census of 1808 records the presence of twenty-two Chinese among a mixed population of English, Spanish, French, German, and Corsican whites, Amerindians, mainly French-speaking free coloureds, and enslaved Africans. The Chinese were probably part of a British experiment to find a source of free labor that could replace the uneconomical slave system. The Chinese experiment was unsuccessful; beginning in 1845, it was replaced with indentured labor from India.
