An A.D. White Professors-at-Large keynote public event

Sir Hilary Beckles (Vice-Chancellor, University of the West Indies-UWI; A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell) will present the keynote public lecture, “The Idea of White Slavery: The West Indies Experience in the 17th Century,” on Thursday, March 27, at 4:45pm, venue: TBD.

This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of History.

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.