Caribbean Studies Seminar Series

CLACS Caribbean Studies Seminar Series actively promotes intellectual engagement and knowledge exchange by providing scholars - including postgraduate students and early career researchers - with the opportunity to present their interdisciplinary, comparative and integrated research on the Caribbean.

Soldiers of Uncertain Rank: The West India Regiments in British Imperial Culture

Speaker: David Lambert (co-Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies)

The West India Regiments were an anomalous presence in the British Army. Raised in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean in an act of military desperation, their  rank-and-file were overwhelmingly men of African descent, initially enslaved. As such, the regiments held a unique but ambiguous place in the British Army and British Empire until their disbandment in 1927. Soldiers of Uncertain Rank (Cambridge University Press, 2024) brings together the approaches of cultural, imperial and military history in new and illuminating ways to show how the image of these regiments really mattered. This image shaped perceptions in the Caribbean societies in which they were raised and impacted on how they were deployed there and in Africa. By examining the visual and textual representation of these soldiers, this book uncovers a complex, under-explored and illuminating figure that sat at the intersection of nineteenth-century debates about race, slavery and freedom; savagery and civilisation; and military service, heroism and Britishness.

David Lambert is Professor of Caribbean History at the University of Warwick, where he is also Co-Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies.  His books include Soldiers of Uncertain Rank: The West India Regiments in British Imperial Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2020), Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He is one of the editors of the journal Slavery & Abolition and is former editor of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.  He is currently working on a new project, 'Campaigning and Counter-insurgency in the Creole Archipelago', which examines the British experience of counter-revolutionary warfare in the Caribbean in the 1790s.

All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Zoom at 16:00 GMT (UK time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button at the top of the page to register.