Fueling Development grapples with the puzzle of why Trinidad and Tobago was able to achieve a relatively high level of economic, democratic, and societal development compared to other countries in the Global South, even though major theories of development would all have predicted otherwise. Leveraging a black radical and institutional approach, Edwards advances the argument that this developmental success was ultimately rooted in a particular form of working-class mobilization in that country, which she terms “liberation unionism”. Focusing on key historical episodes, Edwards documents how this multiracial, broadly inclusive, internationalist, and transformation-seeking labor movement emerged in the early 20th century, radicalized in the subsequent decades, and resurged in the post-independence period after a brief hiatus. In each historical episode, liberation unionism compelled the state to increase its institutional capacity to promote equitable development. While unapologetically focusing on the agency of ordinary working people, the book emphasizes how bottom-up dynamics of class struggle and top-down responses of the ruling elite jointly and interactionally shaped the broader trajectories of political economy.

Edwards’ analysis is based on both rigorous archival research and careful engagement with black radical scholarship of political economy. The book is a beautiful example of theorizing from a particular case in a way that produces powerful across-the-board relevance, speaking broadly to scholars and students interested in global, transnational, and postcolonial sociology, theories of the developmental state, labor and social movements, and the political economy of racial capitalism. This is a book that will be read and talked about for many, many years to come. Indeed, Fueling Development elegantly demonstrates how to balance argumentative clarity with analytical richness. It manages to both sketch out the tight, focused, and clearly delineated overarching argument on which the analysis is centered and present an abundance of secondary analytical insight throughout the text that defies easy summary and forces the reader to read and think meticulously. In the remainder of this review, I highlight three pieces of such analytical insight that raise important and generative questions beyond what Edwards herself is able to discuss in the book. In doing so, I hope to show that the book’s potential to advance scholarship and social theory is impressively multifaceted.

First, Fueling Development argues quite conclusively that class consciousness and race consciousness are inherently interlinked in the working-class movement that is liberation unionism. The age-old debate on whether class identity or racial identity should be “primary” in mass organizing should be settled by this book once and for all. However, in Chapter 4, readers encounter historical actors who were promoting a very different type of racial politics in early postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago: petty-bourgeois political parties. As Edwards writes [129]:

Here, Edwards seems to conclude that the petty bourgeoisie, based on their class interests, possess an inherent tendency to promote reactionary racial politics. This analytical point, which is incisively raised but not fully fleshed out in the chapter, activates the conceptually challenging question of how to theorize the petty bourgeoisie or the middle classes. Further addressing this question would entail a wide-ranging conversation with both black radical thinkers, like Frantz Fanon and C. L. R. James, and classical Marxian theorists of class politics, such as Nicos Poulantzas and Erik Olin Wright. Do the petty bourgeoisie have independent class interests? Some of the thinkers listed above would answer no, arguing that they always go along with whatever class is dominant. And if the petty bourgeoisie do have independent class interests, do these interests tend to be inherently reactionary? Could they contain some positive potential? Or does the political outlook of the petty bourgeoisie actually depend on the specific historical contexts? Fueling Development reminds us of the necessity of a serious class analysis of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly through the race–class nexus, as the book itself starts to gesture toward—but by no means finishes—such an analysis.

Second, Fueling Development raises important questions about the relationship between the labor movement and electoral politics. As Edwards puts it:

Edwards describes the curious phenomenon of workers’ pervasive lack of interest in electoral politics in Trinidad and Tobago, even though she does not really explain the reasons for it. This observation inspires readers to think more carefully through the question of what exactly it is about electoral politics that is so unappealing to the working class in general. Is it because electoral politics is inherently a mechanism to absorb the working class into a state apparatus that is the instrument of the ruling class? Or is there something about the very logic of political representation that denies the agency of working-class actors? Is there something intrinsically depoliticizing about electoral politics? The bigger irony that emerges—not only in the story told in this book but in many other post-democratization societies of the 20th century, such as Taiwan and South Korea—is that the working class fight hard for the right to participate in electoral democracy, but once they achieve it, electoral democracy often becomes something that weakens and alienates their class struggle. Fueling Development opens up a generative intellectual space to revisit this historical paradox.

Third, throughout the book Edwards makes a special effort to ensure that the political implications of her analysis are not misconstrued. In particular, she insists that liberation unionism’s impressive achievements do not negate the necessity for the working class to pursue revolutionary goals. Edwards writes [17]:

While I understand Edwards’ concern with combatting the danger of being politically misread, for me these political statements actually point toward the analytical question of whether liberation unionism in Trinidad and Tobago could have developed into something like a revolution. Were there seeds of a revolution in those waves of general strikes Edwards so vividly documents? If a revolution was a plausible historical possibility, why did it fail to materialize? Was it due to the place of Trinidad and Tobago in the global system of racial capitalism, the organizational form of the general strike itself, historical contingency, or some combination of these factors? What emerges is a genuine opportunity for future research to analyze liberation unionism as a “revolution that could have been” and stage a really interesting conversation with the storied literature on the sociology of revolutions, a line of scholarly inquiry that Fueling Development inspires but does not itself deliver.