Book Review
Montpelier, Jamaica:
A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom,
1739-1912
Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912. By B. W. Higman (Kingston, The Press-University of the West Indies, 1998) 384 pp. $35.00
Higman's latest book on Caribbean slavery, which has been long in the making, is interestingly different from his three previous books. In Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica (Cambridge, 1976) and Jamaica Surveyed (Kingston, 1988), he established himself as the premier analyst of the Jamaican slave system in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Baltimore, 1984), he drew upon slave registration data collected by the British government to present a comprehensive account of slave demography in all of the British colonies on the eve of emancipation. Now Higman gives us a much more particularistic discussion of plantation life during and after slavery on three adjacent Jamaican estates--Old Montpelier, New Montpelier, and Shettlewood--situated close to Montego Bay.
This is not the first case study of a Jamaican plantation in action, and it will not be the last. But Higman's approach is distinguished by his close correlation of documentary evidence with archaeological investigation. [End Page 144] After outlining the history of Montpelier from the 1730s to the 1990s, he devotes the core of his book to land use, settlement patterns, and the social relations and material culture of the slaves. His most novel and interesting documentary source is a detailed listing of the slave households on the three properties in 1825, which, when correlated with slave inventories from the 1820s, permits him to reconstitute family living arrangements. Higman argues that nuclear families were more numerous than extended families at Montpelier, and that 40 percent of the households contained mates. But he also finds a strong mother-child bond. Adult children tended to live with, or next door to, their mothers.
Since the 1825 list identifies a number of stone-built houses at New Montpelier, Higman assembled an archaeological team and located the foundations. Excavation revealed basic floor plans. In one house, they discovered African-style sleeping platforms. Analysis of the animal bones and metal and ceramic shards found at these sites indicates that the plantation workers at Montpelier possessed bowls, plates, and beads made in Europe and Asia; they were active consumers in an Atlantic World economy.
Higman has a chapter called "War, War" in which he discusses the great rebellion of 1831/32, when the slaves burned the estate buildings at Old Montpelier, New Montpelier, and Shettlewood, and fought a pitched battle with the militia at Old Montpelier. He closes by arguing that the whites who owned and managed this estate complex during and after slavery were always parasites, and that the blacks who formed a plantation community at Montpelier were never isolated but always linked to the wider world: to England, Africa, and beyond.
The text is profusely illustrated with maps, plans, tables, diagrams, old prints, and modern photographs--all of which are integral to Higman's design--though some of the prints and photographs are poorly reproduced. The author's oblique method of presentation and his technical style may turn off some readers, which is regrettable, because this book ought to attract a wide audience. But fellow specialists will surely appreciate Higman's important discoveries and relish his total mastery of his sources and his subject.
Richard S. Dunn
University of Pennsylvania
