Sir Hilary Beckles Returns to Cornell
Across the final week of March, Sir Hilary Beckles returns to Cornell as part of the A.D. White Professors-at-Large Program
Biography
Sir Hilary Beckles is a distinguished scholar, internationally acclaimed historian of the Caribbean, and a revered reparations advocate, who has served as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) since 2015, and as the Chairman of theCaribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission since 2013. Equally regarded as an esteemed global public activist in the field of sustainability, social justice and minority empowerment, Beckles has also served as an inaugural member of the United Nations Science Advisory Board on Sustainable Development and an advisor for the UN World Culture Report. A Professor of Economic and Social History at UWI since 1991, Beckles has been a leading voice in higher education recognized for his contributions to the field of economic history, as a pathway in exploring reparatory justice for slavery and the history of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.In 2021, Beckles was named as a Visionary Expert for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s(UNESCO) International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) Futures of Higher Education project, aimed at generating innovative and imaginative ideas about the future of higher education, from a global perspective.
Beckles is an author of thirteen books, eight plays, and over 100 peer reviewed essays covering an extensive range of issues including the history of slavery, gender relations in the Caribbean, sports, and popular culture. The breadth of Beckles’s scholarship and its generalizability to many fields has captured the interests and imaginationsof a vast array of audiences, including numerous departments, programs, and audiences across campus, as well as regional community organizations, particularly as it relates to the matters of social justice and a just future. Through the professorship, Beckles aims to provide public engagement opportunities through a series of lectures, seminars, and workshops, for comparative discussions about slavery and its legacies in the United States and the Caribbean, as well as opportunities to imagine strategies for reparations in the US; discussions made even more urgent in the wake of protests following the murder of George Floyd.
A highly sought-after speaker, Professor Beckles has lectured extensively throughout Europe and Asia. Professor Beckles has been invited by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Caribbean Studies Initiative to give an Einaudi Distinguished Speaker Series lecture, which he is scheduled to present in September 2022. Beckles received his higher education in the United Kingdom and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. (Hons) degree in Economic and Social History from The University of Hull, and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1980.
Schedule of Events
“White Women and the Atlantic Slave System"
Tsujimoto Perspectives in Global Development seminar series
Wednesday, March 26, at 12:20-1:10pm
101 Bradfield Hall and via Zoom
Open to all.
Abstract: The intersection of race, class and gender in the conception and design of the Atlantic Slave system continues to attract multidisciplinary research interest. The Caribbean, and the southern US colonies, provide sharp contrast in some areas but share common structural and social aspects. The presence of white women, bonded and free, was central to the roll out of chattel enslavement as a race-specific order that targeted Africans. The social interactions of white women and Africans, male and female, challenged legislators and provided the core context for continuous refinement of the rules of racial engagement. Indeed, the specific legal architecture of black enslavement (in particular the slave code) was principally a response by white males to protect property rights in production and reproduction. By defining the role and function of white women as carriers of the seed of freedom the slave based order was rendered economically sustainable.
The Tsujimoto Perspectives in Global Development seminar series is cosponsored by the Dept. of Global Development, Dept. of Natural Resources and the Environment, and Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
West Campus Student Engagement Event
Wednesday, March 26, at Alice Cook House
6:00pm Dinner ⋅ 7:15pm Talk
Open to all.
Hosts: Chantal Thomas (Vice Dean and the Radice Family Professor of Law, Cornell Law School; Director of the Cornell Center for Global Economic Justice; and Faculty Director for the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa)
Bassel Khoury (House Assistant Dean, Alice Cook House)
Keynote Lecture: “The Idea of White Slavery: The West Indies Experience in the 17th Century”
An A.D. White Professors-at-Large keynote public lecture
Thursday, March 27, at 4:45pm
Klarman Hall Auditorium and via Zoom
Open to all. A reception will follow in Klarman Atrium.
Abstract: The establishment of colonial dispensations on the Caribbean frontier by rival European imperial powers was conceived and implemented within an ideological framework that sanctioned and mandated the extensive use of servile labour. The creation and survival of economic enterprises across imperial borders in mining, agriculture, distributive trades and services, depended upon the availability of coerced unfree labour. Entrepreneurial thinking, likewise, was constrained by a set of specific economic references in which the attainment of growth and profitability, and a stable social order, were seen as contingent upon the supply and organization of unfree labour.
It was clear to all with an interest in the colonial mission that by the seventeenth century the options as far as labour use was concerned were reduced to three basic forms. These choices were the reduction of the conquered indigenous population to servitude on lands apropriated from them, the transfer or surplus labour from the imperial centre to the colonial periphery under set contractual conditions, and the trading in chattel labour from the already well established African market. Also, these forms were considered discrete in the sense that their structures were clilnically demarcated by racial differences – heightened by clearly distinct methods of recruitment.