Soldiers of Uncertain Rank

The West India Regiments were an anomalous presence in the British Army. Raised in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean in an act of military desperation, their rank-and-file were overwhelmingly men of African descent, initially enslaved. As such, the regiments held a unique but ambiguous place in the British Army and British Empire until their disbandment in 1927. Soldiers of Uncertain Rank brings together the approaches of cultural, imperial and military history in new and illuminating ways to show how the image of these regiments really mattered. This image shaped perceptions in the Caribbean societies in which they were raised and impacted on how they were deployed there and in Africa. By examining the visual and textual representation of these soldiers, this book uncovers a complex, under-explored and illuminating figure that sat at the intersection of nineteenth-century debates about slavery and freedom; racial difference; Britishness; savagery and civilisation; military service and heroism.