| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian. By Maureen Warner-Lewis. (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2007. xvi, 367 pp. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-976-640-197-9.)
Few today would deny the role of slave narratives and biographies in illuminating Atlantic slavery. Americanists in particular crave new vistas into the slave system, and—if the subject was born in Africa—new information about the African hinterland before the mid-nineteenth century, of which little is known. Based on those desires, Maureen Warner-Lewis's book on Archibald Monteath should be well received. It is a critical, yet sympathetic biography of a man who lived an eventful life in slavery and freedom in nineteenth-century Jamaica.	1
The pivotal source for the biography is Monteath's own little-known narrative. Monteath claimed that his natal home was the Igbo region in present-day Nigeria, where he was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. Warner-Lewis infers that Monteath was born around 1792 (p. 41) and that he made the transatlantic passage around 1802. Monteath rose through the slave system, becoming a plantation "head manager" or "head driver" or "headman," and later a helper at the Moravian mission when he became free in 1837, just before general emancipation in the British West Indies. By his death in 1864, he had witnessed slavery, apprenticeship, emancipation, and the emergence of a free peasantry. Researchers have ignored his narrative because of its religious emphasis, indifference to antislavery, and failure to valorize resistance (p. 18).	. . .

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