Speaker 1: 1:05

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Strictly Facts family. We are live again on this wonderful Wednesday with a brand new episode. Our discussion today was inspired for me. On the question, what comes to mind when you think of the Caribbean's military history? What might come to mind for some is, you know, the establishment of today's militaries across the region and our different islands, or even the immense contributions of soldiers from the region during the World Wars.

Speaker 2: 1:54

Now, these are topics that we will definitely get to in later episodes, but you know, as the adage goes, you must know where you are coming from to know where you are going. And so in this case, especially when we're talking about the military, one of the earliest militaries formally organized particularly for this episode in the British colonial government and you know the has taken on this study as a graduate student in the history department at the University College of London. And so, isaac, it is wonderful to have you. Before we dive into this immense history that I, you know, really commend you for studying, why don't you let our listeners know a little bit about yourself? What inspired your love for, you know, studying Caribbean military, military history, and where in the Caribbean, if any, is near and dear to you?

Speaker 3: 2:54

Okay, thank you. First of all, I just wanted to say thank you for having me here today on the podcast. I'm really excited for this discussion. So I'm going to begin with the last of your questions, which was like what's my personal connection to the Caribbean? So my grandparents on my father's side came to britain as part of what we call it a windrush generation, so my grandmother's from guyana. My grandfather was born in barbados and they came over in the 50s and late 50s. Um, and, yeah, settled here, had a family here. So, um, I've got some family ties to the caribbean and, and it's somewhere that I hold closely to me my grandmother was my grandfather passed on before I was born. My grandmother was very involved in raising me and my siblings. So, yeah, I hold my Caribbean roots quite closely.

Speaker 3: 3:40

And, as far as my research goes, I kind of found out about the Western Regiments by accident, found out about the West India Regiments by accident. I got inspired to study Caribbean history when a friend bought me the Black Jacobins by CLR James and it just completely reframed the way I thought about slavery as a historical event. In our education in the UK at that time we had been taught about slavery in the schools, but it was only really slavery in the United States. We didn't know anything about the Caribbean, which didn't really make sense because there was zero African Americans in my school but plenty of people from the Caribbean heritage and West Africans who this history also involves. So, yeah, I didn't know much about Caribbean slavery and I didn't know much about Caribbean slavery and I didn't know anything about resistance. So reading the Black Jacobins and then realising that there was this other side to the story, it wasn't all about the down pressure and suffering and such things, there was also these strong currents of resistance. It fascinated me. Currents of resistance. It fascinated me.

Speaker 3: 4:55

So from there I started to research a bit on my own. I looked at the history of resistance in Jamaica, I looked a bit at um Taki Jovo and the Baptist War during my undergrad degree. Then I moved on in my master's and started looking at Guyana and the 1823 Demerara Rebellion. And whilst reading a book on that, a book by I think she's called Emilia da Costa, a book called Crowns of Glory, tears of Blood, I saw a little footnote which mentioned the West India regiments who were responsible for kind of repressing that uprising, in the main confrontation between the freedom fighters and the colonial forces. It was a west india regiment who kind of fired at the freedom fighters and got them to start running and and it was just this little footnote mentioned in west india regiments.

Speaker 3: 5:42

I never heard of this unit. This sounds interesting. I started to dig into it and I realized all these soldiers are of african well and I said, wow, this is very, very interesting. And I'd noticed the trend. Having looked at all these different acts of resistance, I started to realise that more often than not, if there was an uprising amongst the enslaved, there would be African men fighting on both sides of the conflict. Always, african men were brought in as well to repress acts of resistance.

Speaker 3: 6:14

You know, I found it quite uncomfortable at first. It seemed kind of paradoxical to me and contrary to the reasons why I was looking at resistance in the first place, because I found histories of resistance quite empowering. But then, seeing this other side, I was like like what does this all mean? And so this has led me along this path, researching the West India regiments and also coming to find out that they kind of have had their own uprisings and acts of resistance as well, which I'm sure we're going to talk about later. So yeah, in a roundabout way, I hope I answered all of those questions that you have for me there.

Speaker 2: 6:49

I really appreciate that answer, especially because, very much like you, there are many ways of revolt, of revolution right that I don't think are always upheld and, as you said, that we're going to get into our conversation today, I think the West India regiments definitely are a place for us to dissect that, as we have in several other episodes. And so, for those who may be unfamiliar, the West India regiments were a series of military units that were founded in 1795 as part of the British army and, in true fashion of empire and imperialism, especially during this period and in true fashion of empire and imperialism, especially during this period, britain recruited soldiers from its colonies, especially enslaved populations, toings of the West India regiments where the soldiers came from. You know where this formation really fit into the British colonial model at the time.

Speaker 3: 8:00

Okay, so the very earliest kind of precedent for this. In fact, I should say from the beginnings of the colonization of the Americas, european empires had always used enslaved African men to fight for them whenever the need arose, be that to fight against other empires or, more often, to fight against uprisings amongst enslaved populations, and they usually called these units rangers. So this happens, for example, in Suriname. The Dutch government frees a group of enslaved African men and creates these corps of jaegers, which means rangers or hunters, I guess, in Dutch. And there's a really good record of this, because there was a mercenary from Scotland who joined this unit and he published a book about it. It's very popular. The guy's called John Stedman.

Speaker 3: 9:00

So yeah, the idea of army enslavement is quite a low-running thing. In terms of incorporating them more formally into the British army, the first precedent for that happened during the American Revolution. During that conflict, the British offered freedom to enslaved people. It happened a few different places, but the specific unit that is relevant to our discussion was raised in Carolina. They offered freedom to any enslaved person that would leave their masters and come and join the British, and of course, hundreds did, and many of them basically worked as military laborers for the British. Some were also armed and mounted and they served as a corps of dragoons riding around the Carolinas and firing the Americans. So at the end of that conflict, some of the military laborers called artificers and pioneers, and dragoons as well, were evacuated with the British and they sent them to the Caribbean. They ended up in Grenada, after a short stay in Jamaica. They ended up in Grenada and the governor there, edward Matthews, jamaica. They ended up in Grenada and the governor there, edward Matthews. He used them essentially to fight against resistance by the enslaved and to bolster the military fortification of the island, not just fortifications facing outwardly, towards the sea, toward invasion, but also facing inwardly, to protect St George's, the capital, from insurrection within the island, from conflict with the enslaved populations. So that was the first precedent.

Speaker 3: 10:38

But then later on, as Great Britain basically gets entangled in a war with France during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the way that's experienced in the Caribbean is through a series of acts of resistance by enslaved people, most famously in what was then called Saint-Domingue, what we now know as the Haitian Revolution, but also in Grenada with Fedon's Rebellion, and in Saint Vincent with the Second Carave War, which was fought against the Garifuna people and all other islands that the british occupied from the french at that time in um, guadalupe, martini, uh, saint lucia the british was being forced to fight these kind of counter insurgency wars that's probably how we'd describe it now these guerrilla wars against, you know, formerly enslaved african men within the interiors of the Caribbean islands, where they were. And in each of these cases the British were forced to recruit kind of units of rangers which kind of fit the precedent of what they would normally do, but this was on a much wider scale. Because of this imperial competition, the opportunity for resistance was just magnified. And also you have to think about Victor Hughes, the Republican leader who was sent to the West Indies by the French and he was based in Guadeloupe and he would send kind of Republican agents to inculcate the enslaved populations of British islands with ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and spread revolution and resistance across the region. So the British were forced to recruit these rangers on a much wider scale than ever before and eventually they came to the decision that they would have to formalize these units and incorporate them into the British army in order to retain control of the West Indies.

Speaker 3: 13:20

There were other factors as well as resistance. There was also the disease environment. European soldiers that were being sent out there were dying in droves due to malaria, yellow fever. There was a particularly deadly strain of yellow fever at that time called the Beloma strain, and historian Timothy Lockley writes about this in his book Military Medicine and the Making of Race. And also because of the disease, environment and also, I would say, racism played a role here. But they didn't like to let the European soldiers in the Caribbean conduct any kind of manual labour. So this was another benefit of these groups of African descent they would use them to carry out all the what they would call fatigue duties, which is the constructions of roads, fortifications, these kind of tasks. So, yeah, these are the three reasons why they're raised To labour for the army to save European lives from disease and to fight against other African men, enslaved freedom fighters that were seeking to break their chains and liberate themselves.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Thank you so much for really undergirding, you know, these reasons why the West Indian regiments become very central in the region. And while our focus today is primarily going to be between, you know, 1795 to the middle-ish of the 19th century, the West Indian regiments continue well into the 20th century as well. So again, we'll get to that in another episode. But just for everybody to have context, that this is a, you know, several centuries long history and impact that the West India regiments played within the Caribbean, I'm sure that you know our listeners are being in tune to the years that we're talking about, right? So I said, you know West India regiments start in 1795.

Speaker 2: 15:12

I think a big factor that you know everybody holds on to when they think of acts, especially around this period, that always come up is the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which goes into effect 1834, obviously to end slavery within the Caribbean. But I think really pertinent for our discussion today is one that comes well before that, what is known as the Meepney Act of 1807. And so really, through this act, the West India Regiment's soldiers were free under British rule and so it was kind of the trade-off of being part of this military force and so they were free because of their service, and so what was the reception of this sort of like their new social standing within, you know, not only within the British army, but also within and amongst the other Black people who are on these islands, who are not free at this time, just you know, given the fact that this is almost 30-ish years beforehand.

Speaker 3: 16:15

Sure, yeah, this is such a fantastic question. It really pushed me to think deeply about this because I hadn't considered this. What would have been the reaction of the men to this news? Honestly, I don't have any primary evidence that speaks to this directly. There's very little in the archives that kind of represents the perspective of the troops, the kind of more personal side of their day-to-day lives, their thoughts and their feelings. They really only show up when they do well in in battle, for example, or when they're doing what they're not supposed to do.

Speaker 3: 16:54

These are the two areas that we have the most information about um, so I can only speculate. But I would speculate that they may not have been told, and the reason why is because the whole basis of their military service, the way the military approaches arming these men, they realize that this is a potentially dangerous thing to do, to train enslaved african men in this racialized slave society, and so they're always trying to guard against this. So throughout the whole history, my whole period I've studied, which is about 45 years they're always thinking about ways to um ensure the men are loyal, to control them, and they they never really trust them. Even after they're deployed to fight against freedom fighters, they still don't necessarily trust them, um, and so the reason why I think they may not have been told is because one of their policies to keep these men on side is to constantly tell them how they're different from other enslaved people, their special group, they're not like the other slaves, so on and so forth. So for them to turn around and say, oh, by the way, you're free now.

Speaker 3: 18:02

I feel as though the men might have been like, oh, but weren't we free before? Kind of thing they would have. I think that might have surprised them. And then, in terms of how they were treated before and after that, the key difference would have been not to do with how they were treated within the army, but how they were treated within slave society, because prior to this act, although they were kind of, in a way, free while they were being soldiers, as soon as they leave the confines of their barracks they could be treated as an enslaved person legally. If they they got in trouble, they would be tried using the slave laws of whichever island they were stationed on, which is obviously, um a disadvantaged position for them. Um. So they do show up in some uh like legal records on some of the islands, where they are, where they get into trouble? Um, so yeah, I don't think they would have been told.

Speaker 2: 18:51

But um, basically, I can't answer your question properly, but it is a very interesting question and I am going to keep my eyes peeled on those dates to see if there is anything written certainly, but I I do appreciate you, you sort of cementing us in what other things were happening at the time, especially because you know, as we're discussing right and as you very pointly said, their experiences outside of the confines of their bases or whatever was still, you know, their identity as Black people, regardless of their status as soldiers. So whether they knew that they were free or not, they were still going to experience the world in these particular ways as you've outlined for us. So I do really appreciate you just helping us understand that it wasn't a case where you know the soldiers are running the place, they're free, they're cool, for lack of a better way of framing right. What were some of the soldiers' perspectives, as you know?

Speaker 2: 19:52

You're sort of telling us, you know they show up in the records of you know when they get in trouble and sort of other situations. What were their perspectives on their role in the British Empire, you know, and their participation in the army? I know from some of my brief readings that there were their own internal mutinies within the bases in Dominica, in Jamaica, in Trinidad first, just to name a few. And so how did these examples really complicate their views on their loyalty to the British Empire versus. You know perhaps, their loyalty to their race as Black people.

Speaker 3: 20:29

Right. So I think the most important point on this question is the way these men are recruited. They're not recruited from amongst the enslaved populations that are already living in the Caribbean. Well, they are at first, but quite quickly they kind of exhaust the opportunities to do that. Enslavers don't want to sell their strongest and fittest, their most trustworthy enslaved persons to the army. So the army struggles to recruit from the existing populations in the island. So what they start to do is to contract slave ships and start bringing them over directly from Africa for for the express purpose of um, making them soldiers, and with that one of the benefits they see in that is that these men then have no connections to the enslaved populations who they may be called upon to police or to to like outright repress, um. So I think some of the men kind of more cynically would have seen what was going on in the rest of the island and probably thought to themselves you know what we got here? Kind of nice, cynically would have seen what was going on on the rest of the island and probably thought to themselves you know what we got here? Kind of nice, I don't want to rock the boat here, I'm kind of okay with this, they would have felt like they were in a good position and, in terms of like, from a survivalist perspective, this is okay with me, I can deal with this in order to get through. I think there would have been some um like, even beyond, like a just a pragmatic survival level. They they probably would have become indoctrinated with the, the ideology of the british army and they would have become quite patriotic, probably more like the ncos, the men that are getting promoted and they're closer to the officers and and they might have really enjoyed military life and not really felt much at all towards their enslaved brothers and sisters outside of the army. And there were certainly some who really chafed against their position in Caribbean slave society, who did not want to be in the army, who wanted to be independent and make their own decisions, or even in some cases joined movements of resistance to try and kind of live as free people. So to just go into some more specific examples, you mentioned the three mutinies, which are all very important occurrences.

Speaker 3: 22:43

So after the 1802 mutiny, which is the first one that takes place, this is in Dominica. That island actually has at that time, a population of Maroons living in the mountains and during the mutiny or you could term it an uprising there seems to have been some disagreement about what to do. What the men do is they take hold of this very powerful fortification, described by some of the officers at the time as the most formidable fortification in the world. Someone called it the Gibraltar, the West Indies. So it's a very strong place, very strongly defended, very hard to infiltrate if you were trying to besiege it, for example. So they have a strong position there. But once they um kill some of the european officers that are stationed there and take over, there seems to have been some disagreement about what to do next. But one of the things happens before that mutiny is put down is some of the men actually try and leave that place. They try to cross like a small peninsula to get back into the main part of the island, and I would speculate that from there they were planning to make their way up into the mines and join the Maroons. So even though that mutiny is not successful, when the Maroons are finally defeated there are West India Regiment soldiers amongst them. Some of them may have left during this mutiny, but there's at least one, whose records we have, who was a deserter, not from the unit that mutiny, but from another West India Regiment that was sent in later. He had been stationed in the mountains in a position which was likely their outpost, to probably keep an eye on the maroons, and somehow he starts an intercourse with them and he decides to leave the army and he goes to live with them. But you do get these glimpses of some of these men that may not have been fully satisfied with military life.

Speaker 3: 24:42

A lot of the mutinies that take place involve new recruits, so these are men that have recently survived the trauma of the transatlantic crossing and been placed in this new environment, these fortifications. Obviously they're to keep people out, to defend places, but any fortification, as well as keeping people out, it can be used to keep people in. So we want to think about these guys having been held in like slave castles. Maybe take, for example, cape coast castle in today's ghana, to be transferred from there, put on a ship and then end up in fort augusta, where the mutiny in 1808 takes place in jamaica. That building is is now derelict and nothing's going on there, but it was most recently used as a woman's prison and this really exemplifies my point. These are not just buildings to keep people out. These are buildings to hold people in.

Speaker 3: 25:36

So the way, the way that mutiny takes place in 1808 is these new recruits. They're on the parade ground within the walls of the fortification, the rest of the regiment leaves to to do exercise along the beach and they try and bus out, they run past the guards and they're making their way along the beach to try and escape. Basically, that, to me, suggests these men are not joining the army willingly. They're. They're kind of being forced, they're being conscripted into this. If you think of an enslaved person who just survived the middle passage, they don't really have much say in. You know, these are not people in their most powerful state in an unfamiliar land. So, yeah, they're being forced into this in some cases. And then the final example I want to just bring up that speaks to this point as well, in terms of their own perspective of military service and the one case study I found where we get a glimpse of, maybe, the voice of them in themselves.

Speaker 3: 26:32

This takes place in the bahamas. I believe it's in 1817. The second west india regiment is stationed there and they have a long-running dispute with their officers. So the officers of all these regiments, the men that are in charge of the unit. They're all european men, mostly english, scottish guys, and so the men are constantly complaining to the officers that they don't feel as though they're being well treated. They're not paid regularly.

Speaker 3: 27:01

The officers are mistreating them in other ways. When they try to make complaints to their officers, they're mistreating them in other ways. When they try to make complaints to their officers, they're arrested and then they're put through these things called drumhead court-martials. So these are like it's like summary justice. They're not given proper due process. The men are just simply basically beaten like tortured on a parade ground with military cat-of-nine, nine tails they used to call it.

Speaker 3: 27:30

So what they do eventually is they write a petition from the soldiers, someone leaves the barracks and they post it on a building in New Providence, nassau, the Bahamas. The building's called Vendu House and this is the building in which enslaved people were auctioned upon arrival at the island. So they post it outside this building and the petition basically states that the men are unhappy. It states like 32 men or so at that time are feeling unhappy. They feel as though the commanding officer is giving the other officers too much power to mistreat the men, giving the other officers too much power to mistreat the men and they're appealing to the citizens of the island I guess like the, the white people on the island to intervene and to ameliorate their position, and they kind of threaten violence as well. They kind of hint at the fact that you know their significant military presence, but they do also reassure that their intention is to remain loyal.

Speaker 3: 28:32

So this happens on two occasions and there is a much response from their officers. Their officers kind of brush it off and say that's not really from the men, that's someone else just trying to stir up trouble. And so eventually it all comes to a head when the surgeon attached to that unit is instructed to issue them all with new flannel shirts to wear underneath their uniforms. In order to pay for them, they deduct the pay from the men. Before they give the men their pay, they just take the money out. But they're kind of running a scam on the men where they're going to overcharge them for the shirts. They're charging them a higher price than what the shirt is worth. So they all receive their shirts, but then for two months no one gets paid, and this is in the lead up to christmas. So eventually someone gets.

Speaker 3: 29:15

One of the soldiers gets drunk and he tries to complain to his officer about this and the officer does the normal thing of um arresting him, placing him in a guardhouse and then the next day he's due to be kind of tried in this drumhead court-martial where he's not going to get due process and they're just going to give him lashes basically in front of all the other men. But before this takes place, the men of the unit kind of nominate a few spokespeople who they send into town and they go to some of the leading white figures in town. For example, they go into a woman's office from which you can see the parade ground and they say to him look out your window, look at the soldiers on parade. They're all armed. If you don't deal with this situation, we're not going to put down our wealth. And he takes this very seriously. He goes straight to the garrison to speak to the commanding officer and so on and so forth. So in the end some of the men are punished for leaving their barracks and the commanding officer is charged with basically not leading the men correctly, but the court-martial kind of rules in his favour.

Speaker 3: 30:28

The investigation transpires is made up of a board of soldiers, most of whom are soldiers of that region. So they're directly involved in the case themselves. So obviously they're going to be biased. But the men are successful in getting the price of the flannel shirt reduced, so they do gain some concessions.

Speaker 3: 30:48

But yeah, that for me is just a real snapshot into the fact that we can't assume that just because these men are wearing British uniforms they're all completely happy with what is going on. But they're still compared to European soldiers in the same position. European soldiers at this time in the army you know it's not a pretty lie they're not in a position where they have so much power and agency. But we have to assume that, uh, for men of african descent in slave societies, they're going to have even less options, even less recourse for um, for complaints and so on and so forth, um. So yeah, I think some of them would have been quite happy with their position. Some of them it would have been more practical, a survival thing, and some of them we can see from the primary evidence they were really not satisfied with military life or with their treatment by their officers.

Speaker 2: 31:40

First and foremost, I want to commend you for I think just the breadth of archival research that I am sure is required of this study right, and the fact that you know to do particular kinds of research, especially when it is primarily Black people, people of color, especially when it is in your time period right, requires a sort of creativity in a sense, because you know at that time we're not being allowed to write books and, you know, put out mass texts or whatever sort of things, right. And so your ability to really, like you know, hone in on the court records and things like that, I think is just tremendous and a way to give voice to these men who you know could have very easily gone sort of overlooked in our history today, right.

Speaker 3: 32:34

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 32:36

One thing I think that comes out for me, as you were talking, was also this notion of diaspora, in a way, just to sort of like parallel present day conversations of diaspora to current ones, and the fact that this is the British Empire, right, and so, of course, the fact that you know we're divided by waters right at this time, or and still are today, but because it is the military, they're pulling people from various places to be part of these military units.

Speaker 2: 33:07

And so what comes to mind for me really is thinking of, as you mentioned, soldiers from the US being part of or, you know, during the American Revolution, joining these regiments or, as you said and later clarified for us, right from the Caribbean, also from the west coast of Africa, also being part of what becomes the West Indian regiments. There was a really important part in sort of my own study and the fact that you know there are also Muslim soldiers who go to Trinidad during the late 1810s and really helped to settle the sort of Muslim population there, and this is obviously well before we start seeing certain levels of indentured servitude. And so how did these, you know, varying dynamics based off religion, based off can't say nation, because these places were nations at the time, right, but based off, you know, these different colonies and things and, of course, obviously coming from different parts of West Africa. How do these various things affect perspectives or even cooperations within the West Indian regiments themselves?

Speaker 3: 34:16

Yeah, another fantastic question. These units are extremely diverse, really really diverse. So one of the things that I've done is they have these what they call description and succession books, which lists the names and nation, all the soldiers. So for these West India Regiment soldiers, the names that are given are new names. It's not their real names that their parents gave them at birth, but these are European names that are given to them by their officers upon joining the british army. And the nations that they list are these?

Speaker 3: 34:53

Sometimes they're called like neo-ethnies or there's a big debate about these, these, these kind of terms you may have heard of, like the word coromantee, for example. It's probably the most famous one. Some of them correspond more closely to you know, ethnicities as we know them today. For example, ebo, for the Ebo ethnicity that we know today. Um, so yeah, just even looking through all of those, I transcribed a description and succession book and was able to create statistics on these nations and you, you can see the huge rage of different peoples that were involved and sometimes you see, you know interactions amongst them that perhaps mirror things that were going on in West Africa at the time. So, going back to that mutiny in Fort Augusta, jamaica. The men involved in that mutiny are labelled under the ethnic categorisation as Chamba. They're under the nation category in the descriptionist succession books. Almost all of these men are Chamba.

Speaker 3: 36:01

Now, chamba is not a real ethnicity as we'd understand it today, but at that time that word was used within the gold coast to refer to enslaved people from the region north um of the area that was controlled by Akan people, that's the Ashanti um. They're all from that background, um, and you see that even within this diverse regiment, they choose to carry out that act as a group of people that perhaps were from a similar background within West Africa. Of course, even within the categorisation of Chambi, that would have been a diverse thing as well. But this is what happens with these nations, is that smaller groupings are kind of pushed together through the process of enslavement transportation through Africa. Two individuals that might be from two places that actually don't like each other. By the time they've travelled thousands of miles to the coast. It turns out that that person, who is your enemy, but you still know them, that's, that's then your closest person and you know. This is what happened. So the diversity of the regiment was was definitely key.

Speaker 2: 37:17

Yeah, I mean again, I think this is such an important history for us to know. It's one that I think is rarely talked about. I think often we talk about, you know the world wars and their plaques. I've certainly seen plaques in the Caribbean in honor of men who have fought in the world wars, right and so for me, you've given us several books already. What are some of your favorite? You know examples of how the West Indian regiments and this sort of like Caribbean military history show up in popular culture, and what do you think is really? You know the impact of us understanding you know the West Indian regiments and their relationship to the British Empire.

Speaker 3: 38:02

for us, as you know people today, in understanding the effects of British imperialism, I think that my favourite piece of popular culture related to these units is a book by a man called Brian Dyde. He's not an academic historian, but he himself is of Caribbean heritage and he served within the Royal Navy. His positioning the way he comes at this history. He has a lot of life experience, which really enriches the way he comes at this history. He has a lot of life experience, which really enriches the way he interprets events. His book covers the whole history of the regiments, from 1795 right up to the first world war, and it's the only one that does that, and it's very well written. It's a good read. So that would be my answer to that. But also I should say that I think there's nowhere near enough popular culture referring to these units, because there's so many interesting stories to tell here. I'd really like to see a documentary about them. There's a lot of material culture relating to them as well. I got to visit the Park Camp Military Museum as part of my research when I went to Jamaica and, yeah, so much material culture in there relating to these guys, um. So, yeah, I think there's a lot more popular culture could be produced. There's also a book which I haven't read, but I really need to read, by one of their main historians called um roger buckley. He was like the guy who kind of brought the West India regiments back into focus in an academic sense and he wrote a novel about the 1802 mutiny in Dominica. It's called Congo Jack. So that would be another entry point from a more kind of popular culture perspective.

Speaker 3: 39:41

I really like the way you frame this whole conversation and your references to the world wars and I think, um, obviously the world world war ii, world war one, these are some of the most proximate, you know, cataclysmic events to us in the present day. But even these french, napoleonic and revolutionary wars that resulted in creation of these regiments, these, these are considered today world wars. They were world wars because they were fought in India, they were fought in the Caribbean, in Europe, of course, all over, and in Africa there was conflict that took place. So I think the importance of these regiments to the history of the Caribbean and world history is the patterns that we see emerging in World War I and World War II in terms of the treatment of Caribbean men by imperial powers. These trends are being set earlier, right here.

Speaker 3: 40:43

So I mentioned earlier that one of the key uses of these men is to carry out manual labour. It was widely recognised in the Caribbean that these men were very skilled and they were kind of essential to the repressive forces that Britain had at hand because of their skills. But there was always this aspect to their relationship where they would get called in to do the dirty work. They would have to carry out this manual labour and the Europeans, the white people, would not have to do that. And then you see that reflected later on in the history, for example in World War I, when the West Indies regiments which is different to the West India regiments when they get sent to the Western Front they aren't allowed to engage in any of the actual fighting. They're kind of ordered to carry out these kind of fatigue duties in a very similar way to the West India regiments had to, and they're not allowed to fight.

Speaker 3: 41:43

Eventually the British soldiers get a pay rise, the West soldiers get a pay rise, but the West Indies soldiers are refused that and this kind of leads to the Toronto mutiny.

Speaker 3: 41:54

So we see this pattern of kind of unequal treatment, the use of the troops to labour issues around pay, and then we get the response which is to resist and, of course, the way that these men are labelled at the time is always that, oh, they're not loyal or they're unruly or whatever.

Speaker 3: 42:12

But really and truly, these guys are just seeing the injustice and they're choosing to speak out.

Speaker 3: 42:20

So I think that's really the significance of this is that the British Army are breeding back through history.

Speaker 3: 42:26

They're using the archive, which is something very interesting that I realised when I started doing archival research is that, for example, there's one document that was very helpful to me and it was called the History of Black Troops in the West Indies, and it's someone that works for the Colonial Office has gone into the archive and read all of the documents on the West India Regiment and then produced this report. Something to remember is that colonisers use the archive and read all of the documents on the West India Regiment and then produced this report. Something to remember is that colonisers use the archive, so these guys are seeing the patterns and trends and they're trying to recreate things and react in different ways so that they can control people better, and so on and so forth, and that, to me, is really the significance is that the patterns that are set here with the West India Regiments they play out again when we see World War I and World War III. So, yeah, there's a long legacy from this point and, yeah, history repeats itself.

Speaker 2: 43:18

We hope it stops right, as a positive right. At least we hope that knowing our history helps us prevent it. Again, I'm really grateful to have had you share with us and to really bring this perspective right. I think oftentimes it's so easy, when we think chronologically, to sometimes separate okay, this happened in the 18th century versus this happened in the 20th century not really realizing that, you know, there are continuities.

Speaker 2: 43:45

As you said, right, there are people in power who are heeding back to this earlier time, to, you know, reinvigorate some of these structural problems and us to also, you know, really pay attention to how these things are affecting us today and how we can better understand, not only, as I started this conversation with, where we came from, but also to understand that there are different types of resistances. Right, to get back to your point, and while these men were oftentimes tasked with subduing resistance movements of the enslaved populations, they were also facing several problems within their own factions and battalions. So I again, isaac, am really grateful to have had you to share with us about your research. I'm pulling for you to graduate and finish and you know, as always, right, that's the current thing. We're always, like you know, just got to get to the finish line. But again I really appreciate it and I'm again grateful to have had you and for our listeners. I hope you really enjoyed listening about the West India Regiments. We have definitely more to come on Caribbean military histories. Until next time, little more.