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Demonstrates how Britain's black soldiers helped shape the very idea of race in the nineteenth century Atlantic world.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Medical necessity and the founding of the West India Regiments; 2. The ideal soldier; 3. The use and abuse of the black soldier; 4. Statistics and the reinterpretation of black bodies; 5. Dehumanising the black soldier; 6. Damage done: the Asante campaigns; Conclusion.
About the author
Tim Lockley is Professor of North American History at the University of Warwick and the author of Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (2001), Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (2007) and Maroon Communities in South Carolina (2009).
Summary
This book demonstrates how Britain's black soldiers helped shape attitudes towards race throughout the nineteenth century. Using military-medical literature about the West India Regiments, Lockley shows how Britain's black soldiers were central to intellectual debates around ideas of blackness and whiteness in the Atlantic world.
Additional text
'In clear and accessible prose, Lockley offers cogent analysis of the role the WIR [West India Regiments] and, importantly, the physicians who administered to their men, played in the making of race. Lockley ably mines the rich records generated by the WIR's officers and medical practitioners to chart the evolution of assumptions and attitudes regarding blackness that developed as a result of their comparison of white and black bodies – and the influence these shifting racial ideologies had beyond the bounds of the WIR.' Maria Alessandra Bollettino, Framingham State University, Massachusetts
