Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

Statistics relating to troop mortality in the British Empire had been collected systematically from 1816, but the first serious analysis came in the late 1830s. Alexander Tulloch investigated the causes of sickness and mortality among soldiers, specifically concentrating on establishing the relationship between race and mortality. The reports of West India Regiment surgeons provided him with the largest and most comprehensive data available for any people of African descent. Although it was readily apparent that black soldiers generally had lower sickness and mortality rates than white troops in the West Indies, in Tulloch’s opinion the mortality of black troops should have been even lower. If the black soldier was naturally suited to a West Indian climate, then mortality should be closer to that of Africans in Africa or Europeans in Europe. They fact that it was higher meant, according to Tulloch, that Africans were unsuited to life beyond Africa. The importance of Tulloch’s publications on military mortality was that they appeared just as public interest in statistics exploded, and his research was circulated widely in military and medical publications, helping to shape ideas about black bodies far beyond military circles.

This chapter examines how transatlantic travel writing helped to redefine climate throughout the long eighteenth century. Beginning with the challenge that early modern travellers’ encounters with North American extremes offered to classical theories of climate, this chapter first considers how fears about the inevitable influence of degenerative air gave way to a sense that settlers could change the climate. By emphasising the improving survival rates of European crops and animals, advocates for North American settlement reframed evidence of certain types of productivity as evidence that the climate itself was improving. By thus narrowing the definition of climate, however, this pattern of writing also opened a gap between the stories of improvement circulating in Britain and settlers’ reports on conditions on the (still cold) ground – and so, for many early modern observers, this transatlantic exchange also inspired new scepticism about the political interests served by promises of a changing climate.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.