West India Regiments
The British Army was the single biggest purchaser of slaves by the end of the 18th century. The soldiers they bought joined the West India Regiment and played an integral role in defending British territories in the Caribbean. All serving black soldiers recruited as slaves were freed under the 1807 Mutiny Act. After this, West India Regiment recruits included men liberated from illegal slave ships, as well as black soldiers captured from enemy French and Dutch colonies. After the abolition of slavery, West Indian soldiers remained a part of the British Army until 1927.
The West India Regiment was the first British Regiment of black soldiers, providing 132 years of service both in the British West Indies and worldwide. The WIR would recruit liberated Africans in the Carribean with promises of steady labor, pay and a pension as well as an elevated social station in life. West India regiments, consisting of "men of colour", were found useful for many services in the West Indies, which Europeans could not perform, and, when mixed with Europeans, formed a very respectable force in the field: the 6 regiments consisted of 4,158 men as of 1802.
Slave participation in Britain's New World colonial militias during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries has received scant attention from scholars. Although Caribbean historians occasionally have mentioned such participation, their treatment is usually in passing and cursory. But the recruitment and arming of slaves in the militias of societies dependent on slavery poses a curious anomaly
The lst Battalion West India Regiment was raised in 1795 by the amalgamation of two corps, namely, the Carolina Corps, raised in North America in 1779, and Malcolm's Rangers, raised in Martinique in 1795. When first formed the Regiment consisted of ten companies and a troop of Dragoons, but the latter was abolished in 1797. The Battalion first deployed at Martinique, to various other locations, and at Barbados, with detachment at Tobago and Grenada in 1808.
By 1832 the West-India regiments were quartered at Barbadoes, the Bahamas, and Bermuda, and they performed, in point of fact, the duty of police. Nor was it only along the African Coastline that West India Regiments were actively engaged. Not to speak of the services rendered by the 1st West India Regiment in the suppression of the Jamaica rebellion, 1865, one and all of the West India Regiments were from time to time employed against the hostile Indians of Yucatan, who during twenty years frequently made incursions into the territory of British Honduras under various pretexts, and always detrimentally to the colonists.
The most serious of these invasions occurred in 1866, when the Indians threatened to occupy and destroy Belize itself. Property was wantonly injured, and inhabitants were seized with the utmost audacity, only to be released on payment of heavy ransoms, and a panic on one occasion impelled the inhabitants of Belize to betake themselves to the ships in harbour as the only available refuge from the successful savages. Kanul, the notorious Indian chief soon perceived that to contend any longer with the British was useless, and he accordingly retired into Yucatan,
By the 1860s, parliamentary critic Mr Arthur Mills stated [March 9, 1863] that "if the West India regiments disappeared from the Army List altogether, he should be well pleased. He believed them to be in a very inefficient state, and were altogether an anomalous force."
Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War, stated [11 March 1869] "Looking at the requirements of the service for our West India regiments, we thought that one of them ought to be reduced. The two places in which these regiments are employed are the west coast of Africa and the West Indies. On the west coast of Africa we found that the nominal force employed was one regiment and a half, but if you come to calculate the real strength of the force, you find that in reality it is not more than a single regiment. The whole number of the rank and file on the west coast of Africa is only 844, whereas the strength of a regiment and half is 1,125. That decrease of strength is accounted for partly by the difficulty of recruiting, owing, I am glad to say, to the cessation of the slave trade, which furnished a source from which recruits were drawn."
Until the appointment of the Royal Commission of 1879, the defense of the empire had never been considered as a whole, and defenses and garrisons existing at various places were merely legacies of a period when both political and military conditions were widely different from those of today. This was especially the case in the West Indies where numerous small garrisons were scattered about affording no real protection and only inviting attack. The Commission recommended that these weak isolated garrisons should be withdrawn and be concentrated at such strategic points as would meet the requirements of the navy.
In accordance with this policy it was resolved to fortify and maintain as coaling stations, Jamaica and St. Lucia, and that all the imperial troops in the West Indies should be concentrated at those two places. This did not mean abandoning the other West Indian Colonies to their fate, but was a policy based on the broad principle that their surest protection lay in the efficient maintenance of naval strength in the West Indian waters. At the same time the colonies thus vacated by imperial troops were invited to consider what augmentation of their police or other local forces would be necessary to secure their internal peace and good order.
The Regiment (WIR) was disbanded in 1927, given that local forces were being raised to protect the colonies. The WIR reformed for a short time between 1958 and 1962. The formation of the Federation of the West Indies in 1958 led to the reconstitution of the West India Regiment.
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