Recruitment in the British Army such as French Royalists, Germans, Greeks and Corsicans to supplement its forces. In 1813 one fifth of the army, 52,000 men, were such volunteers. The British Army in 1813 contained over 250,000 men, though this was much larger in comparison to the army at the beginning of the war, the all volunteer British army was still much smaller than that of France, which with conscription had an army over 2.6 million. From 1798 onwards, structural, training and logistical reforms implemented or authorised by the Duke of York (as commander-in-chief of the army) slowly improved the lot of the ordinary soldier.
Recruitment in the British Army soldiers were usually recruited into indigenous regiments, such as the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, to garrison their own land, thus ensuring that the Army did not have to allocate its own units to garrison the territories. One of the oldest regiments raised from the empire was the West India Regiment, which was raised in 1795, and was formed as an integral part of the regular British Army. The recruits of the West India Regiment were originally raised from freed slaves from North America and by the purchase of slaves in the West Indies; the regiment was disbanded in 1927.