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.

While Darwin effectively undermined the idea of any kind of genesis with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the damage to the medical reputation of black people generally, and black soldiers in particular, had been done. Attention in the 1860s and 1870s turned to the performance of the West India Regiments in West Africa in campaigns against the Asante people. Military surgeons, steeped in the now-established medical orthodoxy of black vulnerability to a variety of diseases (particularly lung complaints), constantly grumbled that the West India Regiments were no longer medically fit for purpose. After the 1850s most West India Regiment soldiers were born in the West Indies, rather than in Africa, reducing the rates of acquired immunity to yellow fever. And while the men of the West India Regiments had never been immune to all forms of malaria, surgeons only now began to notice how many of them succumbed to tropical fevers. By the 1870s there was a growing belief that white soldiers should be preferred for campaigns in West Africa, as West India Regiment troops were not thought physically capable of withstanding the climate. Blackness had been transformed from conferring a medical advantage to being a medical liability.

This chapter analyses the rationale behind the founding of the West India Regiments in 1795. It argues that, while various trial runs with black soldiers during the eighteenth century had created a fertile ground for the idea, what forced Britain’s hand was an outbreak of a new strain of yellow fever in 1793. Only those of African descent were believed to be resistant to the disease (many West Africans had experienced a childhood form of the disease and were therefore immune), and when faced with the French arming large numbers of black soldiers in St. Domingue, the British determined to do the same. The decision, however, was principally a medical one rather than simply a military one. European troops would be replaced by Africans – the only men whom physicians had stated were immune to yellow fever in the West Indies.