"Am I not a Man and a Soldier?" (Re)imagining the West India Regiments in the Age of Abolition

The ‘Africa’s Sons Under Arms’ project is sub-divided into a number of components. David Lambert’s part, ‘Slaves to Soldiers’, examines the textual and visual representation of the West India Regiments in Britain and the British Empire in order to understand changing ideas about race, masculinity, the military and empire.

Professor David Lambert is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His research is concerned with slavery and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the Caribbean and its place in the wider (British Atlantic) world. His latest project, ‘Africa’s Sons Under Arms’, is an ambitious research project that uses the British West India Regiment (WIR) to explore the relationships between the arming of people of African descent and the changing nature of racial thought from the late 18th to early 20th centuries.