Stories from the Collections: The West India Regiments

The Royal Geographical Society’s Collaborative Doctoral Awards programme provides an opportunity for PhD students to have direct and unlimited access to our Collections and examine interesting, and often unrepresented, stories through extensive research.

One of our recent CDA students is Cat Sharples. Based at the University of Warwick, the RGS and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cat has been researching the role of military personnel in scientific knowledge-making at the frontiers of the British Empire in the 19th century. In particular, she has been looking at the role of the West India Regiments (WIR) in projects of colonial science (including exploration, botany and ethnology.)

Her project, which contributes to the decolonisation of scholarly collections and academic knowledge, explores how the WIRs occupy a unique place in the history of British Empire; they were a regular part of the British army but were almost entirely comprised of men of African descent.    

While CDA students are given a broad topic to research, they are encouraged to narrow the focus. Cat said: “It’s really useful to have a framework built into the project - somebody pointing you in the right direction of where the materials are and how you might want to approach your project really helps in the early stages”.  

As time went on, Cat’s focus developed. She adopted a biographical approach to her work, with each chapter focusing on a different person but with the same conflict in common, the Anglo Shanty Anti War of 1873-74: “I wasn’t looking at the fighting side of things, which other people have done, but how that regiment and specifically the character of that regiment, has impacted on colonial scientific research in the 1850s-1890s.”  

Students undertaking a CDA with the Society have a plethora of unique opportunities, including curating a cabinet display on site. For Cat’s display, she chose to highlight Chapter One of her thesis which centres one book in particular; a journalistic account of the 1872 expedition to the Kaieteur Falls in British Guiana, as experienced by three of the WIR members.

While historians have generally overlooked this expedition, Cat’s research centres it as fundamentally significant for not only documenting the first ever photographs taken of that region but as a means of understanding the role of military personnel in colonial science, their relationships with the natural world and with the region’s Indigenous communities.