Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874 by Tim Lockley

Abstract

Lockley’s Military Medicine and the Making of Race explores the ways in which medical observations of Black colonial soldiers shaped ideas about race in the nineteenth century. Directing his attention to the exceedingly well-documented West India Regiments, transatlantic companies of Black regulars in the British colonial army, Lockley combines methods of social history and the history of medicine with statistical analysis to probe evolving racial attitudes in the anglophone world. The book draws upon a rich cache of military and medical sources, from British War Office manuscripts to medical journals and military magazines.Lockley expertly layers the on-the-ground observations of military medics and officers with the contemporary nineteenth-century publications of physicians, scientists, and racial theorists. The result is a compelling and informative study that offers a fresh perspective on the inextricable relationship between race and empire.The first part of the book traces the foundations of the West India Regiments and delineates the specific ways in which Black soldiers were deployed by the white officers who commanded the corps. The British army, Lockley shows, raised the West India Regiments in large part because Black troops had consistently proven more resistant to the tropical diseases that decimated white regiments in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Beginning in the late 1790s, British officers stationed Black soldiers across numerous swampy and sickly colonial batteries in an effort to preserve white lives. In tropical garrisons, officers subjected Black soldiers to remarkably abusive treatment and harsh military and non-military labor, believing Black people to be innately suited to toil in the tropics. Such uses and abuses endured by Black troops, Lockley demonstrates, influenced both racial and medical thinking, as military doctors attached to the West India regiments filled journals and reports with observations about “superhuman” Black soldiers who survived brutal conditions in the Caribbean.In 1838, the statistician Alexander Tulloch published a lengthy report about British troop mortality in the Caribbean that turned the notion of Black “superhumanity” on its head. Tulloch posited instead that mortality rates in the predominantly African West India Regiments were still higher than they should have been, concluding that these soldiers were poorly suited for service anywhere outside their “countries” of origin.The second half of the book centers Tulloch’s Report and its outsized impact on racial thinking in the mid-nineteenth century. Lockley shows, for example, that ethnologists in the United States voraciously consumed Tulloch’s statistics and conclusions regarding the West India Regiments, which they spun to support a mid-nineteenth-century “American school” of polygenesis that viewed Europeans and Africans as distinctly different species. Ethnologists like Josiah Nott, drawing from—and, in some cases, misreading—Tulloch’s work, stressed that each “race” had its own space on earth in which it was best suited to survive. Lockley concludes with a medical analysis of the Asante campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s. Warfare on the Gold Coast, he illustrates, effectively demolished any lingering ideas of Black military superiority as soldiers from the West India Regiments took ill in camp and on campaign and died at alarming rates.A particular strength of Lockley’s book is its meticulous analysis of contemporary sources. The fourth chapter, which is devoted to army medical statistics, builds a rich discussion of race, climate, and health from seemingly mundane records. Furthermore, Lockley’s scrutiny of the methodologies (and errors) of nineteenth-century statisticians, ethnologists, medics, and others provides a powerful demonstration of the ways in which ideas about race and Blackness were developed, challenged, misunderstood, and invented. Focusing on the anglophone Atlantic world by design, Lockley successfully draws the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and the coast of West Africa into his analysis, though some comparative attention to evolving racial attitudes in the French, Dutch, and other Atlantic empires may have enriched this study even more. This minor quibble, however, does not diminish the strength of Lockley’s arguments and analysis. This book should be of interest to scholars of race and racism, the history of medicine, and British Atlantic and imperial history.