Sir Hilary Beckles

Hilary McDonald Beckles was born on 11 August 1955 in Barbados and began his secondary education at Coleridge and Parry School in Speightstown. He was sent to England to complete his schooling, studying in Birmingham, and went on to the University of Hull, where he earned a BA with honours in economic and social history in 1976 and a PhD in 1980.

He joined the University of the West Indies as a lecturer in 1980, aged 24, and was later granted a personal professorship at 37, the youngest in the university's history. He became pro-vice-chancellor in 1998 and principal of the Cave Hill campus in Barbados from 2002 to 2015.

In May 2015 Beckles became the eighth vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, leading a regional university serving many Caribbean nations. He is also president of Universities Caribbean and a leading figure in higher education across the region.

Beckles is among the foremost historians of Caribbean slavery. His books include Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide (2013) and The First Black Slave Society, which examines the Barbados of the seventeenth century. He has published more than a hundred scholarly essays and over a dozen books, as well as plays, on subjects ranging from slavery to gender relations, sport and popular culture.

In 2013 he was asked to chair the new CARICOM Reparations Commission, and the University of the West Indies established a Centre for Reparations Research under his guidance. He has also served on UN committees, edited a volume of UNESCO's General History of Africa, founded the C.L.R. James Centre for Cricket Research, and was knighted by Barbados in 2007. In 2024 he was appointed to chair the United Nations University's governing council, beginning in 2025.