Hilary Beckles – författare

In this first volume Professor Hilary Beckles examines the short-lived "first rising" of West Indian cricket supremacy, arguing that it sent a clear message to the world that the newly independent nations of the West Indies were able to lead world cricket with certainty, purpose and poise.

In this second volume, Beckles assesses what impact the globalization of cricket has had on the cricketers of the Caribbean. He also describes the emergence of what he argues is a debilitating sub-nationalism in the West Indies, and the effect this has had on the game.

In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados’s history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century – the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s – but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, “disposable” workforce, fortunes that secured Britain’s place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.A prequel to Beckles’s equally compelling Britain’s Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbarity Time in Barbados, 1636–1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.