Contestation Between the State, Oil and Fishers in Trinidad and Tobago: (Re)producing ‘Edge’ Populations on the Post‐Plantation Extraction Frontier

Successive waves of extraction in the Caribbean—from plantation monocultures to oil and gas—have reshaped overlapping agrarian, coastal and marine environments, undermining the socio‐ecological foundations of small‐scale fisher livelihoods and generating ongoing conflict between the state, energy sector and fishing communities. Yet despite the importance of fishing to post‐colonial island economies, these tensions are rarely examined through a post‐plantation lens. Bringing Caribbean plantation scholarship together with more recent work on race, social reproduction and exclusion, this article examines the enduring colonial logics structuring such contestation in Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing on historical, ethnographic and interview research, it argues that historically entrenched systems of valuation and dispossession remain fundamental to understanding how some people and places become devalued and how this, in turn, facilitates continued extraction. Small‐scale fishers and marine environments are conceptualised as ‘edge’ populations and spaces whose marginality is continually (re)produced by state‐mediated capital accumulation rooted in colonial legacies and oriented towards export‐driven extraction, rather than rural development or domestic food security. In Trinidad, extractive capitalism intensifies processes of devaluation, expropriation and exclusion, while sustaining an illusion—or ‘masquerade’—of inclusion. Understanding fishers' position in this way reveals the cyclical nature of their struggles and demonstrates that their marginalisation and depletion are implicated in, rather than peripheral to, post‐colonial capitalist development. Consequently, these frontier spaces and the marginal communities that populate them remain important sites of social reproduction and negotiation over legitimacy and control.