‘Of equal or of more service’: black soldiers and the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the British military’s deployment of black soldiers in the West Indies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Seven Years’ War. It analyzes two subjects that remain neglected despite the recent upsurge of interest in mid-eighteenth-century global imperial war: the vicissitudes of these conflicts in the Caribbean and their meaning for the lives of enslaved and free blacks. It contends that black soldiers’ martial exploits convinced British officials that they were essential weapons with which to secure and expand the Empire in the Atlantic: a conviction that led British officials to clash with southern mainland North American slaveholders during the War for American Independence.