Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795-1874

The book explores how Britain's black soldiers shaped attitudes towards race in the nineteenth century, highlighting the West India Regiments' extensive records and the changing perceptions of black soldiers' physical abilities. It also discusses the international impact of these publications, particularly in the US.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 221 pages
Publication date: 11 August 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Britain's black soldiers played a significant role in shaping attitudes towards race throughout the nineteenth century. The West India Regiments, a part of the British military establishment for 132 years, generated vast records with details about every one of their 100,000+ recruits, making them the best-documented group of black men in the Atlantic World. Tim Lockley's book demonstrates how, in the late eighteenth century, surgeons established in medical literature that white and black bodies were radically different, forging a notion of the superhuman black soldier able to undertake physical challenges far beyond white soldiers. By the late 1830s, however, military statisticians would contest these ideas and highlight the vulnerabilities of black soldiers instead. The popularity and pervasiveness of these publications spread far beyond British military or medical circles and had a significant international impact, particularly in the US, both reflecting and reinforcing changing notions about blackness.

Weight: 330g
Dimension: 152 x 227 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781108797139