The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

The narrative arc of this essay takes British author Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) from her abolitionist, progressive life in Britain in the 1790s to slave-dependent Barbados, where she ran a school for girls between 1815 and 1822. To riff on the title of Marilyn Butler’s 1982 Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Fenwick moved from 'rebel' to 'reactionary' in her transatlantic journey from the political centre to the colonial margins. Despite being steeped in the revolutionary politics of the late Enlightenment, when Fenwick arrived in Barbados in late 1814, despite her abolitionist politics, she could not understand the 'cunning and ingenuity' of the actual enslaved people she encountered, just prior to Bussa’s Rebellion. By using the critical frameworks developed by scholars such as Hilary Beckles and Pedro Welch to analyse the resistance strategies used by the enslaved people Fenwick would have encountered in Barbados at the time, I explain what Fenwick could not.