At various times and for various reasons, all Atlantic empires chose to arm people of African descent. In the British Atlantic world, slaveholders, military officers, and colonial assemblies in the Caribbean and mainland North America routinely placed weapons in the hands of their black populations. People of African descent, both enslaved and free, protected British colonies from invasion, controlled enslaved populations, and participated in Britain’s wars of imperial expansion throughout the Atlantic world. By the late eighteenth century, black soldiers had proven indispensable to British Atlantic warfare as they accounted for much of Britain’s colonial military manpower. Britain’s dependence on black soldiers was both rooted in and reinforced by the idea that people of African descent were innately different from Europeans and particularly well suited for tropical warfare. Indeed, tropical diseases did kill European soldiers at alarming rates. Britain’s deepening reliance on black soldiers and the belief that people of African descent were the ideal tropical warriors ultimately culminated in the establishment of the West India Regiments – a permanent corps of African soldiers under British officers – in 1795.

Our papers rely upon colonial records and private and published accounts of officers, medics, and observers to interrogate the significance of black soldiers to the British empire. We trace the evolution of ideas and theories about the relationship between race, slavery, and military service. Further, we demonstrate Britain’s perpetual dependence on armed people of African descent for protection and imperial expansion, a dependence which outlasted the slave trade and slavery in the British empire. The panel should be of interest to scholars of Atlantic history, military history, and the British empire. Panelists draw upon two case studies – the Maroons of Jamaica and the West India Regiments – that depict different contexts in which British officials recruited people of African descent for military service. During this session, panelists seek to raise and answer several questions: By what means did Britain recruit people of African descent for military service? What was the relationship between race and the British military? How did the deployment of black soldiers enforce the racist assumptions on which the institution of slavery depended, and how did it challenge these assumptions? What effect, if any, did British abolition have on the arming of people of African descent in the British empire?