7 - Bringing the Troops Home

Summary

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the final remaining West India Regiment within the mass militarised culture of late nineteenth-century Britain. The first book-length regimental histories date from this period. Written by men who had served in the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War as junior officers, these histories offered more celebratory accounts of the West India Regiments and represented an effort to secure the status and historical legacy of the units. A particular focus of the chapter is the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 when representatives of the regiment were present in London. The coverage they received, as well as their depiction in popular cultural forms, serves to reveal their exclusion from a British Army that was rendered White and metropolitan at this apogee of a racially inflected imperial culture. As such, the partial equality that had been granted to their Black soldiers when they were created a century earlier was symbolically undone.