Kings Indian Orderly Officers, 1903.
Courtesy: National Army Museum

Service of ethnic personnel in the Armed Forces of the British Crown can be traced back several centuries. Up to the First World War, service was mainly within the local defence forces formed in the Empire as it developed, to protect British strategic interests in the region from internal and external threat.

The largest of these military forces came from India. The Indian Army started life in the seventeenth Century when the East India Company recruited local personnel to guard its interests, although formed units were not organised until the mid eighteenth Century. It recruited throughout the sub continent, mainly in the south and coastal regions where the earliest European interests were located, but gradually expanded its recruitment base to include others including, from 1815, Gurkhas from Nepal (which was never actually part of the British Empire) and later men from the Punjab and other parts of northern India. Not all service was in the home country; between 1860 and 1914, for example, Indian Regiments served in China (1860), Abyssinia (1868) and Somaliland (1903).

Recruitment of ethnic personnel took place throughout the Empire, including China, East and West Africa, and the West Indies. Most recruits enlisted into local defence forces, although a few, such as the West India Regiment, existed for overseas service. The West India Regiment has an interesting history. Originally recruiting slaves and some free blacks, it was the longest continuously serving black regiment, existing from 1795 until its first disbandment in 1927. It won many honours in the process.

The Royal Navy has long been an ethnically diverse force. Throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, as Britain’s empire grew to cover a quarter of the globe, the Navy employed men from all over the world. Until 1853, recruitment was the responsibility of the captains of individual ships, and the Navy relied heavily on the Merchant Navy, which employed mixed race crews, for its manpower. At the Battle of Trafalgar, for instance, HMS 'Victory' carried 71 men of foreign nationality. In the famous painting of the Fall of Nelson by Denis Dighton, shown to the right, a black seaman can be seen manning the cannon on the middle left of the picture.

Not all recruits were free. John Perkins, for example, entered the Jamaica Squadron in 1775 as a ship’s pilot having previously almost certainly been a slave. Within a few years he was commanding a schooner with brilliant success and in 1782 he was commissioned as Lieutenant in command of the brig ‘Endeavour’. In 1800 he was promoted to Commander.