In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Zophia Edwards. Edwards is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her book is Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Zophia Edwards: We are living through a profound crisis of the Western-centered global order. Neoliberal capitalism has exhausted its legitimacy, offering neither social welfare nor democracy, while relying on coercion, racialized carcerality, anti-immigrant politics, and militarized borders to manage exacerbating inequality. The escalation of US militarism, widening global inequality, white supremacist violence, anti-Blackness, and genocide are not separate phenomena. They are interconnected features of a world system structured to maintain Western extraction from and dominance over Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the broader Global South. The urgent question for working people worldwide remains how to resist these forces, improve lived conditions, and defend human dignity and well-being.
Fueling Development helps readers understand the present by grounding today’s crises in a longer history of capitalist exploitation, racial domination, and Black working-class struggle. Focusing on Trinidad and Tobago, the book shows how working people achieved significant improvements in their standard of living despite colonial extraction, oil dependence, and ethnic division imposed by the colonizers. These gains emerged from a tradition of Black radical trade unionism that extended beyond workplace demands. Working people built a movement anchored in distinctive Black radical political philosophies, strategies, and expressions of Black liberation. Rooted in Pan-Africanism, multiracial unity, anti-imperialism, and democratic control over resources, workers built a movement that challenged colonial and postcolonial elites and forced the state to respond to popular demands. Their struggles stimulated the expansion of health and social services, infrastructure, education, and raised living standards. The book reveals not only the political and economic conditions under which working people won these gains, but also how those advances were later constrained by global economic shifts and elite efforts to reverse labor’s achievements. Therefore, the book underscores that capitalist development, redistribution, and democratization are not neutral or technocratic processes, but terrains of struggle shaped by race, class, and empire. Through the experience of working people in Trinidad and Tobago, the book invites readers to think more broadly about contemporary conditions: what it takes to build multiracial movements and sustain mass politics, how states absorb or neutralize radical demands, and why rebuilding working-class power remains essential to today’s emancipatory projects.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Activists and organizers can draw many lessons from the argument and evidence laid out in this book. One central lesson is that, for African and Indian working people in Trinidad and Tobago, building multiracial worker unity did not require suppressing racial identity or treating race as a barrier to class struggle. Fueling Development shows that racial consciousness and class consciousness can coexist and, when politically organized, can strengthen collective power. Workers drew on racial pride alongside shared histories of subjection to white racism and imperial and colonial domination to build unity across communities. The key insight is that the political effects of racial identity are not predetermined: for people in the most marginalized communities, race consciousness can divide, or it can affirm dignity while fostering cooperation around shared material demands. The task for organizers is not to move communities racialized as non-white beyond identity, but to organize identity and link racial affirmation to inclusive structures, political education, and broad working-class struggle.
Second, the book underscores the importance and difficulty of building worker power. Working people in Trinidad and Tobago created powerful trade unions that were capable of confronting capital and the state through a range of activities at the local and global levels. However, they also faced repression, internal conflicts, and cooptation. Activists today can find insights into what is required to build and sustain mass power from both the victories and the setbacks of the Trinbagonian working people.
Finally, the book highlights the counterrevolutionary strategies of capital and political elites. States often adopt progressive language while emptying demands of their substance. The book encourages organizers to remain vigilant about how power operates in specific contexts, to link local struggles to global systems of exploitation, and to center anti-imperialism, multiracial unity, women’s leadership, and the needs of the most marginalized. Overall, the book shows that liberatory movements are not starting from scratch; working people have already developed a blueprint for collective action and transformative change.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Within academic circles and popular discourse, there is a dominant belief that colonizers, political elites, technocrats, or external experts are responsible for the improvements in the quality of life of working people. This view, which is rooted in capitalist elitism, colonial racism, and neoliberal common sense, casts ordinary people as lacking the vision or capacity to shape national development. Fueling Development challenges this narrative by showing that major social gains in Trinidad and Tobago were won through sustained organizing by ordinary African and Indian toilers themselves. Development was not simply delivered from above; it was demanded, shaped, and enforced from below. By centering their agency, the book encourages readers to move beyond elite-centered accounts and recognize working people as the primary architects of social change.
The book also joins works that challenge a narrow understanding of trade unionism as merely economistic or reformist. These kinds of unions certainly exist. However, there are also unions where workers organizers both in workplaces and in communities, and for both bread-and-butter as well as political reforms. The history I trace shows that in the Black radical tradition of trade unionism in Trinidad and Tobago, unions were sites of expansive political imagination, internationalist thinking, and collective care. They challenged imperial power, articulated alternative futures, and insisted that democracy must extend into multiple domains. The demands, concessions, and reforms were therefore much more broad-based and improved well-being for a larger proportion of society beyond waged workers.
Finally, the book pushes back against the idea that counterrevolution, cooptation, defeat, or depoliticization are natural endpoints for radical movements. By examining how power actively works to neutralize transformative politics, the book reframes “failure” as a product of struggle rather than proof of impossibility. In doing so, the history invites readers to reject cynicism and fatalism, and instead see history dialectically and as a resource for sharpening political clarity, rebuilding confidence in mass politics, and recommitting to the long work of liberation.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
My work is deeply shaped by the tradition of Black radical political economy developed by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, and others. These thinkers provide theories of capitalism, development/underdevelopment, inequality between and within countries, and democracy that extend far beyond more dominant accounts. These thinkers also take the racial and colonial architecture of global capitalism seriously. Racial hierarchy and colonialism are not side issues or marginal concerns; they are central features of the world-scale organization of wealth accumulation and the production of poverty. Relatedly, they assert the distribution of power, economic resources, rights, and privileges runs not just along racial or class lines but along complex configurations of race, class, and gender. In other words, they offer a way to analyze how different intersections of race, class, and gender in the social hierarchy shape the content of the struggle over material resources and political power and the balance of power between groups. Finally, my work is also inspired by these thinkers’ insistence that ordinary people generate history and political knowledge through collective action. Therefore, I take the struggles and self-activity of working people seriously as a site of theory-making. Together, these are invaluable tools for analyzing and understanding questions of development, democracy, and liberation across countries and across time.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
Two recent books I would recommend are The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye, edited by Alissa Trotz and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. Trotz’s book is a collection of the writings of Andaiye - one of the Caribbean’s most important grassroots organizers and radical political activists. Born in Guyana, Andaiye brought together anti-imperialism, women’s liberation, multiracial unity, and working-class struggle as she challenged not just neocolonial governance and racialized and gendered exploitation in her home country, but across the Caribbean region and the world. The book shows how powerful political ideas and strategies are built through everyday organizing, political education, and deep self-reflexivity and accountability to communities. As I move forward, I want to draw on this example to better understand how bold visions for social change grow out of movement work on the ground.
Reproducing Domination, co-edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Aaron Kamugisha is a collection of Percy Hintzen’s writings. Hintzen, a preeminent sociologist in Anglophone Caribbean studies, and in this collection, his essays help make sense of why political independence has not always led to real freedom or equality. He shows concretely how imperialism and the racial and class hierarchies created under colonialism shaped the Caribbean post-colonial state and continue to affect power and opportunity today. My future research will focus on decolonization processes across former British colonies. The two books are relevant for this work and for BAR readers because they help explain why today’s political and economic crises are rooted in the unfinished business of decolonization and continued external economic control. They also point to the importance of grassroots organizing, political education, and multiracial, working-class movements as essential tools for confronting these ongoing structures of domination, building more just alternatives, and achieving genuine self-determination.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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