Introduction

Summary

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book and establishes the context from which the West India Regiments emerged in the late eighteenth century. The British had successfully expanded their control in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century even though mortality in the army remained stubbornly high. On some campaigns enslaved people had been used in short-term auxiliary military roles, setting a precedent that would be followed to its logical conclusion after 1795. Slavery remained the bedrock of Caribbean society, and while racial concepts remained somewhat in flux during the eighteenth century, they were gradually hardening. West Indian physicians, however, generally agreed that black and white bodies were fundamentally the same.

This book is about race. Specifically, it is about the development of racial thought from the end of the eighteenth century through to the second half of the nineteenth century. It starts with one war – Britain’s epic struggle with France between 1793 and 1815 – and ends with another – the Anglo-Asante War of 1873–4, neatly sidestepping the American Civil War in between. It is apt that warfare bookends this study since the main focus of the book are the West India Regiments (WIRs), British army units composed largely of men of African descent. This book uses the WIRs as a lens to focus in on changing racial attitudes in the anglophone Atlantic.

Racial Thought

Race is a slippery concept. As a means of categorising peoples it has only a tangential relationship with biology.¹ It is far too subjective, and often personal, for that. As individuals we each perceive race differently, primarily via sight but with the other senses contributing as well, constructing a racial identity for ourselves and for others that may not concord with those of other people.² Someone whom I perceive to be white, for instance, might not be perceived by others as white, or indeed think of themselves as white. If race is confusing now, it was an even more plastic concept for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘being determined by lifestyles, diet and, above all, by climate’.³ Skin colour, usually given primacy as a means of racial categorisation today, was just one means of classifying and describing bodies. As Edward Beasley has put it, before the late eighteenth century there was ‘no idea of race as we have come to know it – no widely shared theory of biologically determined, physical, intellectual, and moral differences between different human groups’.⁴ English trader Bartholomew Stibbs, visiting the Gambia River in 1723, remarked, without apparent irony, that the local inhabitants were ‘as Black as Coal; tho’ here, thro’ Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men’.⁵ This lack of intellectual coherence left gaps that individual non-whites were able to exploit, asserting rights to freedom, land and even suffrage for a period, that were normally reserved for whites.⁶

But fluidity in racial thought did not translate to better treatment of non-whites. As Europeans explored the world, they were supremely confident of their own moral, religious and technological superiority over all non-European people, whether Amerindian, Asian or African.⁷ After all, it was Europeans who instituted a system of plantation slavery in the Americas that involved the involuntary labour of millions of Amerindians and Africans, and the deaths of a high percentage of them.⁸ Yet historians have noted a clear evolution in racial thinking during the later eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Skin colour became the predominant racial marker, and demarcations between whites and non-whites became clearer throughout the Atlantic World, both legally and culturally. Whites came to what Roxann Wheeler has described as a form of ‘cultural consensus’ about their rightful dominance over all others.⁹ Whites ruled simply because they were white, and blacks toiled because they were black. Racial categories as a result became fixed and unalterable and were the most important way colonisers defined themselves in opposition to the colonised. Heathens might become Christian, the uncivilised might become educated, but black people could not be transformed into white people. Race had always been important, particularly so in the Americas, but, as one writer put it, by 1850 ‘race is everything’, with political, economic and social ascendancy granted to whites and denied to others.¹⁰

A common explanation for this transformation of racial attitudes points to slavery as the culprit.¹¹ The most typical encounter between white people and those of African descent involved enslavement in the Americas, with the attitudes of those coming from Europe being continuously moulded by the denigration, mistreatment and objectification of black bodies.¹² When voices began to be heard challenging enslavement from the 1770s and 1780s on, new and powerful justifications for the system were required, spelling out the clear differences between black and white people. These rationales claimed, among other things, that black people were intellectually incapable of becoming truly civilised and needed white protection, guidance and supervision.¹³ Despite slavery ending in the US northern states, and subsequently in the British Caribbean, racial attitudes in anglophone societies continued this hardening trend. Indeed, as Britain’s imperial tentacles began to reach every corner of the globe, involving the subjection of an immense variety of different peoples, ideas concerning ‘separate, stable, physically distinct, and physically inheritable races’ firmly established themselves as the intellectual mainstream.¹⁴

But an alternative and complementary story can be told about evolving racial attitudes, one that does not revolve around enslavement. Slavery, in some senses, overly dominates of our understanding of how black people were perceived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of those writing about black people were really writing about enslaved people and concerned with denigrating or supporting the institution of slavery and not with blackness per se, though those two things were obviously intertwined to a significant degree. Free black populations existed throughout the Atlantic World, often eking out marginal existences in port towns, but few whites paid them much attention.¹⁵ They appear in a diverse set of records generated by church vestrymen, tax collectors, census enumerators and court clerks, but rarely, if ever, systematically over a lengthy period. No one had the time or the inclination to study free black populations closely in order to establish a concept of blackness outwith the paradigm of slavery. This is where the WIRs fit into this story because they provide historians with a detailed and sustained look at a single group of black men where slavery is, for the most part, not a relevant factor.

Black Soldiers

Black soldiers were not unique to the British army, nor were they a sudden creation of the 1790s.¹⁶ European powers had recruited black soldiers for service in the eighteenth-century Caribbean on several occasions, and in St Domingue, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to retain control, France had both ended slavery and accepted tens of thousands of former slaves into its service.¹⁷ The WIRs stand out from these other examples of black soldiers for the simple reason that, once established in 1795, they existed in one form or another until 1927. For 132 years the regiments were a fully fledged part of the British military establishment, not a temporary corps of colonials or an informal militia, meaning they were officered just as white regiments were, and, crucially, that they generated the same bureaucracy. In addition to a normal complement of majors, captains, lieutenants and ensigns, each WIR was assigned an adjutant (responsible for overall administration), a quartermaster (overseeing supplies), a paymaster (ensuring all men were paid properly), a surgeon and an assistant surgeon (with responsibility for sanitation and healthcare). These men generated paperwork – vast quantities of it. Each wrote letters and reports to the two command headquarters in the Caribbean, in Jamaica (covering Honduras, Jamaica and the Bahamas) and in Barbados (covering the Windward and Leeward Islands, as well as Guyana), and also completed routine reports to the War Office in London. Regiments were required to report on troop strengths on a monthly basis, including the numbers who were sick and had died since the previous report, as well as those who had been recruited, transferred or invalided from service. Moreover, each regiment was inspected on a bi-annual basis by a senior commander, who examined internal management and discipline to assess whether the regiment was fit for duty. In addition, the regiment generated internal records such as pay books, regimental court martial information and muster or succession books that detailed the name of every recruit, physical information (age, height, hair and eye colour), where they were born, when and where they joined the regiment, promotions or reductions and the date and reason they left the regiment (transfer, death or retirement due to ill health or old age).

Aside from the regiments themselves, the usual operations of the British Empire and its army also generated plentiful records pertaining to the WIRs. Military commanders kept in regular touch with government ministers in Whitehall, informing them of ongoing troop movements and active campaigns, as well as pointing out operational constraints. Colonial governments were just as active, compiling huge amounts of internal information including records of legislative debates and laws passed, colonial censuses, shipping and customs data, and letters. Much of this was sent to the Colonial Office in London. The WIRs feature in many of these records, particularly when they were engaged in active operations. As the first regiments in the army containing men of African descent, the WIRs were also objects of curiosity, featuring in visitors’ accounts of the West Indies, in letters written by residents to relatives elsewhere and in both local and British newspapers. Put simply, the importance of the WIRs for the study of the evolution of racial thought in the nineteenth century lies in the fact that they are the best-documented group of black men in the Atlantic World. Each regiment contained at least 500 men, and some grew to more than a thousand. In 1802 there were twelve regiments of about 500 men each, or roughly 6,000 men in total, and at the end of the century there were still more than 2,500 men serving in the West Indies and Africa.¹⁸ During the course of the nineteenth century, the cumulative total number of men who passed through the WIRs must exceed 100,000. Even the most complete sets of plantation records are nothing like as comprehensive and, of course, cover far fewer people, though they do add vastly to our knowledge of black women who are largely absent from the records of the WIRs.¹⁹ The nearest comparable set of data is that collected about the black soldiers fighting for the Union army during the American Civil War. There were far more of them than ever served in the WIRs but, crucially, the data only covers a very short period.²⁰

Although the WIRs, by the simple virtue of being on the regular army establishment, generated vast amounts of records, not all of the data has survived to the present day. Survival depended on a number of factors, including assiduous record keeping in the first place and remembering to transfer papers along with the regiment. The WIRs were regularly rotated around the various Caribbean islands, often serving in small detachments, and from the 1820s onwards they periodically spent time in Africa. All of the earliest records of the 2WIR were lost in 1825, after being left behind in Sierra Leone when the regiment embarked for the West Indies, while those of 1WIR ‘were lost in the expedition to and from New Orleans’ in 1815.²¹ When regiments were disbanded the records were supposed to be deposited in London, but it is clear that many were not. Moist tropical climates are not particularly conducive to record survival, and natural disasters such as hurricanes also probably took their toll. It is also clear that a lot of records that made it back to London have subsequently been lost or destroyed. Regular reports from regimental surgeons after 1817, for instance, clearly existed in the late 1830s as they were used for statistical analysis, but few exist now. Regimental documents, including letters written to and from WIR commanders, were used for two regimental histories published towards the end of the nineteenth century, but following the disbandment of the regiment in 1927 these documents have also subsequently been lost.²² Despite what might be termed normal record loss over the course of two centuries, vast quantities of documents remain. Many of the biannual inspection reports survive, as do some of the muster and succession books, all of the earliest pay books and most of the correspondence between commanders in chief and the War Office and between island governors and the Colonial Office. As a result, it is possible to know more about these men, how they were treated and what others thought of them, than it is for any other group of men of African descent in the nineteenth century. Generally missing, of course, are first-hand accounts written by the men themselves. We will never have a real sense of how the men understood or felt about their military service. Most black soldiers were illiterate, and even if some did acquire a form of literacy while members of the WIRs, writing equipment was expensive and not always in ready supply in remote locations. Thus, we are left with sources written by white people that need to be read with caution and awareness of pre-existing racial attitudes. It is partly for this immensely practical reason that this book focuses on how others perceived and interpreted the men of the WIRs.

As this book will demonstrate, those thinking about race as a concept in the early nineteenth century, how ‘blackness’ could be defined, measured or quantified as something tangible and in opposition to ‘whiteness’, turned again and again to the example of the WIRs. As Chapter 1 explains, the entire rationale for the creation of the regiments in the dying years of the eighteenth century rested upon ideas about black bodies and their resistance to tropical diseases that were exacting a heavy toll on white Europeans. During the early decades of nineteenth century, the surgeons attached to the WIRs helped to forge a notion, explored in Chapters 2 and 3, of the ‘superhuman’ black man, able to undertake physical challenges that were simply beyond the white man. This largely positive view of those of African descent neatly coincides with Britain’s era of humanitarianism identified by James Walvin.²³ The deterioration in racial perceptions of WIR soldiers occurs almost immediately after full emancipation in the British West Indies was achieved in 1838. Working with a vast array of medical data that compared white and non-white soldiers, military statisticians, discussed in Chapter 4, began to chip away at the idea of the medical supremacy of black soldiers and highlight their vulnerabilities instead. The popularity and pervasiveness of these publications spread far beyond British military or medical circles and had a significant international impact, which is the subject of Chapter 5. By the second half of the nineteenth century, old tropes about black resistance to tropical diseases had almost entirely been replaced by new ones, discussed in Chapter 6, that emphasised the new-found medical vulnerability of black troops, even in tropical zones. Studying the WIRs therefore allows historians to measure the evolution of racial thought in the nineteenth century relating to one specific body of men, where slavery is not the defining issue. Overwhelmingly, the data and discussion of the soldiers of the WIRs deals with them as black men, and not as enslaved black men, even though a number technically were enslaved until 1807. Some writers deliberately went out of their way to draw a distinction between the WIRs and the enslaved or, later, the newly emancipated West Indian population.²⁴

Military Medicine

This book is also a medical history, specifically of military medicine in the nineteenth century. It is a history both of surgeons serving with the British army, either attached directly to the WIRs or to the general staff at command headquarters, as well as of medical thought. Hundreds of medically trained personnel served with, or alongside, the WIRs, observing the men up close and first-hand. Some were fresh-faced young men straight from medical school (most frequently graduating from Edinburgh University), others were veterans with many years of prior service with white regiments. Civilian doctors already based in the West Indies were sometimes drafted in to assist the army, particularly during wartime. One historian of military medicine has described an appointment to a WIR as the ‘shortest straw’ any up-and-coming physician could draw, but that characterisation is a little unfair.²⁵ In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the West Indies was the most likely place where army physicians would gain experience overseas during active operations.²⁶ And some of these physicians turned out to be the most eminent medical minds of their day, publishing widely and holding high office in the Army Medical Department. Surgeons serving with the WIRs dealt with every ailment that the men presented with, from the minor to the life-threatening, and arguably, since on average every man visited the hospital at least once a year, surgeons knew more of the men than any other single white officer.

Surgeons kept detailed records of every case they treated, noting symptoms, possible diagnoses, attempted treatments and eventual outcomes. These records were reported back to London, both in tabular form (where they would be used to collate vast quantities of medical statistics) and with an accompanying narrative. Since they spent a great deal of time trying to treat illnesses that, with hindsight, we know they had no means of curing, surgeons read treatises and medical journals that offered advice on the latest treatments. Occasionally they would contribute their own articles, highlighting regimens they considered particularly effective. Sometimes they published books on diseases common among armies or the possible cures for tropical fevers. Their experiences were inevitably shaped by their day-to-day encounters with mainly African-born men, but what made their writings particularly interesting to those beyond the army was that they often contrasted their treatments for black soldiers with those for white officers or, if working in a garrison hospital, with ordinary white rank and file soldiers. There were very few medical environments in the early nineteenth century where black and white bodies were treated side by side, allowing surgeons to observe the ways in which the two responded differently to treatment. The cumulative weight of this unique literature began to shape wider debates about black and white bodies, and later influenced discussions about the different ‘races’ of humanity.²⁷

This book builds on the work of several scholars who have highlighted the link between the publications of army surgeons and the shaping of racial ideas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mark Harrison, for example, observed that physicians based in the West Indies, many of whom had associations with the military, ‘had an important bearing upon the development of ideas about race and susceptibility to disease’.²⁸ John Rankin’s study of the British in West Africa in the nineteenth century acknowledged that ‘race was an important part of British military plans in West Africa’, determining the composition of garrisons for instance, while Suman Seth’s exploration of medicine and race in the British Empire in the eighteenth century makes repeated use of the publications of military physicians to demonstrate how they helped to shape early racial attitudes.²⁹ These works, despite being excellent contributions to the wider field, make little, or in some cases no, use of the extensive records relating to the WIRs. Indeed, several fail to acknowledge that some of the most important military-medical writers of the eighteenth century, including Benjamin Moseley and Robert Jackson, served alongside black soldiers at some point during their careers. Rana Hogarth’s engaging and informative Medicalizing Blackness does deal briefly with the WIRs, but then moves swiftly on to a broader discussion about diseases believed to be peculiar to enslaved people in the United States.³⁰ In short, this book aims to delve much deeper into the rich sources relating to the WIRs and place them at the heart of the evolution of racial ideas from the late eighteenth century onwards.

The West Indies

The Caribbean acts as a backdrop to this study. For more than a century, between 1492 and the early seventeenth century, the Spanish dominated the Greater Antilles, undertaking what can perhaps best be termed a genocide against the native Taino peoples.³¹ From the 1620s first the English and then the French, Dutch and Danes successfully challenged the Spanish monopoly in the Caribbean, establishing their own colonies and commencing nearly two centuries of tit-for-tat island conquests that eventually saw Britain emerge with the most profitable island possessions in 1815. The Caribbean was crucial to the formation of British racial ideas because it brought light-skinned British people into close, regular and sustained contact with dark-skinned African people for the first time. Although the British explored a large part of the world in the seventeenth century, incorporating much of it into the British Empire, the West Indies was the only tropical region to see significant immigration from the British Isles. The direction of British settler migration in the 1600s was definitely westwards, first towards Ireland, then across the Atlantic to the Americas. Commercial enterprise in Asia, by contrast, often revolved around trade with powerful and populous states, with permanent British settlement often limited to coastal factories.³² In Africa only a very small number of British people attempted to reside in the slave-trading forts in Sierra Leone or at Cape Coast castle.³³ The most profitable opportunities in the Americas lay not in trading with native peoples, but in the production, processing and exporting of staple crops, tobacco in the Chesapeake and sugar in the West Indies. This necessarily involved the settlement of people willing and able to clear land and plant crops. The most important of the early British Caribbean colonies was Barbados, first settled in 1627, which rapidly attracted a resident landowning planter class, and a far larger mass of white indentured servants to work on the land. Indeed, for all the dominance of New England and the Chesapeake in the historiography of early America, twice as many British people migrated to the West Indies than the North American mainland in the first half of the seventeenth century.³⁴

It was not long, however, before white indentured servants began to be supplanted by African slaves. By the time Jamaica was wrested from Spanish control in 1655, there was little attempt to experiment with white labour and the focus was on importing as many Africans as possible for sugar cultivation. The shift from white indentured labour to black enslaved labour was not immediate, but once the transition began it was unstoppable.³⁵ A number of interlacing factors influencing the growth of slavery were at play simultaneously in the West Indies, but most historians agree that economic considerations were paramount. The supply of indentured servants began to dry up at the same time that the number of Africans imported by English ships, long involved in the transatlantic slave trade, was rising. For English planters, who co-opted the entire legal basis of slavery from the Iberian powers, the economic equation became straightforward: over the longue durée it was far cheaper to import Africans, who might provide twenty or more years of labour as well as future generations of workers via natural reproduction, than use white indentured servants on fixed-term contracts.³⁶

Largely absent from historiographic discussion about the transition from white indentured to black enslaved labour in the West Indies is any sense that the impact of tropical climates on the human body was relevant. No one attempted to justify or rationalise the enslavement of black people in the seventeenth century by claiming that only those used to a tropical climate could work in such heat. After all, white servants had been employed successfully, though no doubt uncomfortably, in Barbados in the first half of the seventeenth century. Yet the Caribbean was absolutely central to the formation of British ideas about tropical climates in general.³⁷ As James Lind pointed out in the mid-eighteenth century, there was a professional opportunity ‘for medical observations, during a very sickly season in the West Indies, when thousands of Europeans are sent thither at once’.³⁸ The hot climate was obviously alien to the British, it was usually the first thing that new arrivals noticed, and therefore most physicians thought it would inevitably have a negative medical impact.³⁹ As one Barbadian doctor remarked, heat and moisture combined to ‘render the fibres of the body more lax, abate the vigour of the circulation, increase the viscidity of the blood, promote sensible, and diminish insensible perspiration’. These rapid physical changes had consequences that manifested as a ‘seasoning’ fever, indeed ‘there are very few upon their first arrival who escape the attacks of this furious invader … the fatality of this disease deservedly place[s] it in the front of destroyers’.⁴⁰ The experience of John Taylor, who visited Jamaica in 1687, was perhaps typical. Within weeks of his arrival twenty-two-year-old Taylor succumbed to a fever that reduced him to ‘perfect weakness’ for more than three weeks. After a lengthy convalescence he was then ‘violently seized’ with a stomach illness.⁴¹ Taylor was a short-term visitor to the West Indies, but permanent immigrants surviving the seasoning fevers were not by any means guaranteed a healthy future since the periodic appearance of new diseases put everyone in danger. In 1692 a ‘terrible contagion … raged like a pestilence’ in Barbados, killing up to twenty people per day in Bridgetown, with the high mortality attributed to the fact that the disease ‘probably derived from the coast of Africa’.⁴² The disease was most likely yellow fever, and a further outbreak in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1737 killed a quarter of the population.⁴³ Perhaps most frightening of all, there was little anyone could do to avoid illness. Even those taking every precaution were ‘by no means secure’.⁴⁴ The hostile disease environment took a heavy toll on migrants to the West Indies. Trevor Burnard has demonstrated that deaths far outnumbered births in Jamaican parish registers and that even in the eighteenth century more than a third of indentured servants died within five years of arrival.⁴⁵

The ‘seasoning’ fevers combined with other exotic and particularly deadly epidemics to create, to use Karen Kupperman’s phrase, a ‘fear of hot climates’ in British minds.⁴⁶ This fear was exacerbated by what David Arnold has termed a ‘great outpouring’ of medical publications that outlined in often graphic detail just how pestilential such illnesses could be for Europeans.⁴⁷ These publications should have terrified anyone contemplating a voyage to, let alone permanent settlement in, the West Indies. Keen followers of writings about the Caribbean would have been unable to avoid the overwhelming impression that ‘the climate of the West Indies [is] unfriendly and unpleasant to an European constitution’.⁴⁸ No doubt most migrants to the Caribbean expected to become sick on arrival, but they came anyway spurred on by the enormous potential for riches beyond imagination. Servants completing their term of indenture hoped to obtain lands of their own, something few would have aspired to in England or, if not, a comparatively high-waged position. The demand for skilled white workers remained persistently high throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁴⁹ And there was always the dream that, with a huge helping of good fortune, the seasoning process would work. Mark Harrison and Suman Seth have pointed out that eighteenth-century medical writers generally agreed that European settlers could, eventually, adapt sufficiently to live safely in the tropics. Most believed that as humans shared a common origin, and had spread across the globe to populate torrid, temperate and frigid zones, it was self-evident that adaption was possible. There were plenty of white individuals who had survived for twenty or thirty years in Barbados, St Kitts, Antigua and Jamaica who were living proof.⁵⁰ Becoming acclimated was a lottery, however, and mortality of new migrants remained stubbornly high.

If white mortality was appalling then, if anything, enslaved mortality was worse. Although the theory of climate held that the natural inhabitants of a hot climate were not white, they were black, imported Africans singularly failed to thrive in the West Indies.⁵¹ A number of explanations can be proffered – Africans were often sick when they arrived; planters cut costs by reducing provisions, clothing and shelter for enslaved people (compared to white indentured servants), leading to increased vulnerability to disease due to malnutrition or exposure; and it was simply cheaper to replace overworked slaves with new arrivals than spend resources maintaining those already there.⁵² For those who bothered to comment, and many did not, high mortality among enslaved people was usually attributed to ‘excessive labour’, not to the climate and not to the tropical fevers that so decimated white immigrants.⁵³

Embodied Differences

Although it was widely accepted that climate was responsible for physical differences among men, and that fair-skinned men lived in cold regions while dark-skinned men lived in warm regions, West Indian physicians in the eighteenth century actually thought these differences to be quite superficial. Since ‘human bodies are greatly influenced by the climate, air, soil, diet etc of the places we inhabit’, it was inevitable that the skin tones of enslaved Africans and their European enslavers would be different, but, according to Barbadian Richard Towne, ‘this reaches no deeper than the outward cutis’.⁵⁴ Most believed there was little or no underlying physical dissimilarity between whites and blacks. Griffiths Hughes, whose Natural History of Barbados was published in 1750, reported that he ‘never could find out any extraordinary difference’ between white and black bodies, and that even their mental abilities were broadly similar, taking into account education.⁵⁵ And while eighteenth-century Caribbean physicians observed varieties in the diseases that white and black people were prone to, they did not generally attribute this to innate differences between white and black bodies, instead pointing to either adaptation or circumstances. Richard Towne’s Treatise of the Diseases Most Frequent in the West Indies, published in 1726, noted some diseases were more common among black people, but they could also be found in ‘white people, whose unhappy circumstances have reduced them to Hardships but little inferior to what the blacks are obliged to undergo’.⁵⁶ William Hillary observed that many Barbadian epidemics ‘generally seize the negroes first’ but mused, ‘Is it not because they are little or thin clothed, and often poorly fed, and much more exposed to all the variations of the air, and inclemencies of the weather?’ High rates of tetany he attributed to ‘the negroes going barefoot, and thereby being more exposed to such injuries … [or doing] such work as renders them more liable to get such wounds’. Diseases often thought to originate in Africa, such as elephantiasis and yaws, he noted had spread into the white population ‘who are not exempted from it’.⁵⁷

Yellow fever was the single exception to the general understanding that diseases were largely indiscriminate. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this virulent and deadly disease was confined to tropical regions, though it would eventually venture as far north as New York, Philadelphia and Gibraltar. West Indian physicians quickly noticed that the disease ‘most commonly seizes strangers, especially those who come from a colder, or more temperate climate’.⁵⁸ Several also observed that ‘native white men of the islands are seldom affected’ or, at the very least, they seemed to be ‘much less obnoxious to it’. But the immunity of local whites was not absolute. Hugh Smythson believed that natives leaving the tropics for any period became vulnerable on their return, and white men engaging in ‘debauches or violent exercise’ risked becoming ill regardless of their nativity.⁵⁹ Whites of all types certainly seemed to be less immune than Africans, ‘none of whom, of either sex, natives or foreigners, are ever known to be attacked by it’.⁶⁰ Henry Warren in Barbados was among many medically trained people who struggled to explain how ‘the negroes, whose food is mostly rancid fish or flesh, nay often the flesh of dogs, cats, asses, horses, rats etc who mostly lead very intemperate lives, and who are always worse clad, and most exposed to surfeits, heats, colds, and all the injuries of the air, are so little subject to this danger?’⁶¹ Scottish physician Alexander Wilson speculated that ‘the continued vegetable diet’ of field slaves ‘acts as a constant corrector of putrescent tendency’, thus exempting them from the disease.⁶² The perceived vulnerability of Europeans, and comparative immunity of Africans, to yellow fever would come to lie at the very heart of discussions at the end of the eighteenth century about physical differences between white and black bodies. Was it a case of something innate in the black body that offered greater resistance to this disease, or simply a matter of black bodies being better adapted to the environment? This debate, as we shall see in the following chapter, had a direct influence on the creation of the WIRs.

The West Indies held a peculiar sway in English minds of the eighteenth century. As home to the largest emigrant English population in a tropical region, the Caribbean islands clearly helped to shape and disseminate ideas about how heat affected health. After the loss of the mainland American colonies, it was also the only region that could give emigrant Britons a first-hand encounter with imported African slaves. But, as we have seen, despite a brutal plantation regime that held little regard for the welfare of enslaved people, older ideas about race that emphasised religion, language, technology and civilisation above all were remarkably persistent and had yet to undergo any radical transformation. Black bodies, deep down, were understood to be pretty much the same as white ones. The superiority of white Christian culture was unquestioned, of course, but not because of some innate difference in white biology. Lack of opportunities and education were most often blamed for the supposed inferiority of Africans, rather than inherent flaws with brains or bodies.

In the final decade of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean continued to draw European attention. The uprising of enslaved people in French St Domingue in 1791 had repercussions throughout the Atlantic World, and soon afterwards Britain, France and Spain resumed their long imperial rivalry in the region. Simultaneously, debates in Britain over the morality of the international slave trade to the West Indies highlighted to a wider audience the truly terrible conditions endured by captives. This led some people to begin to question how Europeans treated non-white people more generally. But most importantly for our purposes, it was during this tumultuous decade that Britain would embark on a military experiment, the WIRs, that would eventually help to entirely refashion white ideas about black bodies.