"Jared Ross Hardesty's new critical edition, The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman, makes an important and necessary intervention into the study of eighteenth-century Caribbean travel writing and natural history by foregrounding the previously unpublished diary entries Stedman authored in Suriname, rather than focusing solely on his writings printed in the metropoles of Europe. Hardesty's edition is especially useful because it includes both a transcription of Stedman's Suriname diary and a detailed appendix tracking key discrepancies between the diary and Stedman's heavily revised printed natural history. This focus on genre and the editorial process in the production of Anglophone transatlantic writing is an excellent resource for students and scholars of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and the Atlantic World. I can see this being a helpful resource in an early American or eighteenth-century history or literature course, as it would enable students to easily compare differing editions of Stedman's Suriname writings. What Hardesty's edition of The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman offers is a more accessible study of how eighteenth-century writing on maroonage, slavery, science, and abolition was heavily mediated in the print and production process, as this compiled edition offers critical insight into the gendered and racial politics of life in the colonial Caribbean as well as how printers in the metropole attempted to alter the writing of colonizing authors like Stedman." - Elizabeth Polcha, Drexel University
Jared Ross Hardesty is Professor of History, Western Washington University.
"The writings of Johan Gabriel Stedman offer a fascinating, uncensored view of an eighteenth-century plantation society. They expose the brutality of slavery on almost every page. Framed by an excellent introduction and superbly annotated, Jared Hardesty’s edition of Stedman’s work is a must-read for scholars of slavery and the colonial Americas. Moreover, as an eyewitness account it is ideally suited for use in the classroom." -- Willem Klooster, Clark University
"Stedman’s brutal involvement in the suppression of the African Maroons of Dutch Suriname is well known. Now Hardesty makes accessible an annotated version of the diary in which Stedman first recorded his daily exploits. Through a comparison of relevant portions of the diary with what was later published, Hardesty shows that Stedman lived an even more brutal and debauched life than he later revealed publicly." -- Paul E. Lovejoy, York University
