“Saving an extraordinary expense to the nation”: African recruitment for the West India Regiments in the British Atlantic world

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides a comparative and transatlantic analysis of the forcible recruitment of Africans for the British West India Regiments. From the 1790s to the 1860s, West India Regiment officers plundered slave vessels for young African men whom they could conscript for military service. This process began with the purchase of thousands of enslaved Africans upon arrival in the British Caribbean and continued well beyond British slave-trade abolition as officers drew thousands more recruits from slave ships intercepted by the Royal Navy. Tracking through wartime and peacetime and through monumental imperial anti-slavery actions, this article demonstrates the curious cohesion in pre- and post-abolition recruitment for the West India Regiments. It posits that coerced African enlistment represented a troubling counterweight to the spirit of British anti-slavery, as regimental officers maintained their grasp on thousands of victims of the transatlantic slave trade throughout the so-called Age of Abolition.