The West India Regiments: African Soldiers, War, And Empire in The British Atlantic Tropics

This dissertation reconstructs the lives and military labor of African conscripts who served in Britain’s West India Regiments, formal companies of Black infantry, in the Caribbean and coastal West Africa in the nineteenth century. The Regiments, valued by their officers and the British state for their apparent resistance to the tropical “miasmas” that massacred white soldiers, occupied colonial garrisons on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Caribbean, they engaged French forces and policed enslaved and free Black populations. In West Africa, they patrolled the frontiers of nascent British settlements and subjugated coastal African states on the orders of the imperial government. Most of the soldiers who comprised the West India Regiments over the first half of the nineteenth century had been enslaved, forced into the corps upon arrival in British Atlantic colonies on slave vessels. In the army, Black soldiers endured particular military tasks and methods of discipline that were influenced by evolving imperial ideas about race. But despite the intense order under which they lived, African regulars nurtured personal relationships with chosen associates, both inside the colonial garrison and away from it, for which soldiers’ African backgrounds were key facilitators. The West India Regiments reframe histories of Atlantic warfare, migration, slavery and abolition, race, and tropical disease, opening each of these themes to new connections, sources, and research methodologies.