Military Medicine and the Making of Race

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"This book is about race. Specifically, it is about the development of racial thought from the end of the eighteenth century through to the second half of the nineteenth century. It starts with one war - Britain's epic struggle with France between 1793 and 1815 - and ends with another - the Anglo-Asante War of 1873-4, neatly sidestepping the American Civil War in between. It is apt that warfare bookends this study since the main focus of the book are the West India Regiments (WIRs), British army units composed largely of men of African descent. This book uses the WIRs as a lens to focus in on changing racial attitudes in the Anglophone Atlantic. Racial thought Race is a slippery concept. As a means of categorising peoples it has only a tangential relationship with biology.1 It is far too subjective, and often personal, for that. As individuals we each perceive race differently, primarily via sight but with the other senses contributing as well, constructing a racial identity for ourselves and for others that may not concord with those of other people.2 Someone whom I perceive to be white, for instance, might not be perceived by others as white, or indeed think of themselves as white. If race is confusing now, it was an even more plastic concept for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 'being determined by lifestyles, diet and, above all,by climate'"--