| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Ben Vinson III. Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 304. $60.00.

This book by Ben Vinson III is an important work in a field of growing prominence. Historians of the colonial societies of the Americas have long been aware of the role played by free people of color in militias. Most slave societies relied for the majority of their internal security forces on free coloreds. In Saint-Domingue (Haiti), for example, 104 of the 156 militia companies in 1789 were made up of free coloreds, while free coloreds comprised less than half of the free population. Students of these societies have generally pointed to the role militia service played in strategies for social advancement—personal and group—of free coloreds. Herbert S. Klein raised these points in "The Colored Militia of Cuba 1568–1868," in Caribbean Studies 6:2 (1966): 17–27. More recently, Peter Voelz addressed the social impact of military service in Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas (1993). My own recent work on Saint-Domingue illustrates the process of social advancement through military and police service there (see Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Military and Civilian Free Coloreds in the Colonial Society of Saint-Domingue [2001]). . . .

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