Lockley’s Military Medicine and the Making of Race explores the ways in which medical observations of Black colonial soldiers shaped ideas about race in the nineteenth century. Directing his attention to the exceedingly well-documented West India Regiments, transatlantic companies of Black regulars in the British colonial army, Lockley combines methods of social history and the history of medicine with statistical analysis to probe evolving racial attitudes in the anglophone world. The book draws upon a rich cache of military and medical sources, from British War Office manuscripts to medical journals and military magazines.

Lockley expertly layers the on-the-ground observations of military medics and officers with the contemporary nineteenth-century publications of physicians, scientists, and racial theorists. The result is a compelling and informative study that offers a fresh perspective on the inextricable relationship between race and empire.

The first part of the book traces the foundations of the West India Regiments...

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