Black Warriors and the British Empire: The Evolving Bounds of Race and Civilized Warfare in the Seven Years’ War in the West Indies

Maria Alessandra Bollettino

This paper examines the British debate over the benefits and dangers of arming people of African descent, and how British methods of deploying free and enslaved Blacks as military laborers and soldiers evolved and expanded over the course of the Seven Years’ War.  It contends that black men successfully exploited the opportunities opened to them by the conflict, forcing the British to recognize their centrality to the security, as well as to the prosperity, of the empire in the Caribbean.  In proving their martial worth, people of African descent helped to reshape British colonial defense policy and laid the groundwork for subsequent developments, such as Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation and the British West India regiments.  In this, they set the empire for which they fought and labored on a new path.  Whereas the British had once been the most hesitant of the European imperial powers to employ warriors of African descent, the events of the Seven Years’ War convinced them of the indispensability of black soldiers, especially in the southern hemisphere.  The British, once strident disparagers or reluctant imitators of French and Spanish military convention, became instead innovators, and by the turn of the nineteenth century they had established themselves as the most extensive employers of enslaved soldiery of all the European imperial powers.

[WP #07010]