Title: Robinson Crusoe Author: Daniel Defoe Creation Date: 1719 Location: England Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was published in London on 25 April 1719 and went through four editions in its first year. Defoe was nearly sixty, a Presbyterian dissenter who had stood in the pillory for seditious libel in 1703 and served as a secret agent during the Act of Union negotiations. The book was loosely founded on the account of Alexander Selkirk, marooned on Más a Tierra for four years, but Defoe transformed that anecdote into something whose ideological implications would occupy critics for three centuries.
The thematic core is the myth of the self-sufficient individual: the man who, stripped of society, reconstructs it through labour, ingenuity, and a Protestant covenant between God and the industrious self. Crusoe builds a shelter, a calendar, a farm, a theology improvised from the one rescued Bible — the first figure in English fiction to perform the grammar of capitalism and colonial settlement: improvement of raw land, conversion of wilderness into property held by right of labour. When Friday appears he is the labour this enterprise requires — rescued, renamed, taught English and Christianity, put to work. He is a function, and the function is servitude rendered as gratitude.
Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) identified Crusoe as the archetypal "economic man." Karl Marx satirised the Robinsonade tradition in Capital. James Joyce, lecturing in Trieste in 1912, called Crusoe "the true symbol of the British conquest." To understand the empire's view of itself, you start here.
The Imperial Machine
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 handed Britain the asiento — the contract to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish American colonies — and the South Sea Company was chartered to exploit it. Defoe wrote in support of the company's expansion. The Royal African Company had by 1719 lost its legal monopoly but still operated forts along the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. The Bristol and Liverpool slaving voyages were ramping up.
Crusoe's biography is a précis of this machine. He goes to Guinea on a trading voyage, is captured by Sallee rovers and enslaved in Morocco, escapes, sells his fellow captive Xury to a Portuguese captain, and ends up in Brazil as a sugar planter. Crusoe is wrecked because he and his neighbouring planters have fitted out a vessel for the Guinea coast. Defoe states the slaving purpose plainly and never returns to it.
The economic logic Crusoe carries onto the island is the logic of the enclosed estate. He keeps double-entry accounts of goods, time, blessings and afflictions. He surveys his territory, assigns names, calls the island "my island," styles himself its "governor," and extracts oaths of allegiance from castaways who arrive. The island is, in miniature, an English chartered colony — a private property held under improvement, defended by force, governed by a proprietor whose authority derives from having got there first and worked hardest.
The Subjected People
Count the people whose silence the novel depends on. There is Xury, the boy slave Crusoe escapes Morocco with — loyal, useful, and sold the moment a Portuguese captain offers a good price. Crusoe records a twinge of conscience and takes the money. The promise to free Xury in ten years may or may not be kept; Defoe does not look back.
There is the Brazilian plantation workforce. Sugar in Brazil in the 1650s was worked almost entirely by enslaved Africans and indigenous Tupinambá from bandeirante raids. Defoe names none of them. When the captain reports the plantation flourished in Crusoe's absence, neither he nor Defoe asks whose hands kept it going for twenty-eight years.
There are the Caribs — whose name Spanish chroniclers looted to coin "cannibal," making their supposed flesh-eating the legal pretext for their enslavement. Defoe gives them no language, culture, or name. They exist to provide the body Friday will be rescued from.
And then there is Friday — the only subjected person allowed to speak, and what he says is overwhelmingly some version of "Master." Defoe lingers approvingly on his European-shaped nose, as if to reassure readers this savage has been racially pre-qualified for civilisation. Crusoe teaches him to say "Master" before any other word and instructs him in a simplified Protestant catechism. Friday has no past, no mother, no village, no name in his own tongue. He is constructed entirely in the negative space of what the master needs from him.
The Reckoning
Edward Said put Crusoe at the centre of his argument in Culture and Imperialism (1993): the novel is "the prototype of the modern realistic novel" and inseparable from "a far from accidental convergence between patterns of narrative authority constituted in the novel on the one hand and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism." The pretence that you could read it innocently was itself an artefact of imperial common sense.
J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) is the most thorough literary answer: Susan Barton inserted onto Crusoe's island, taken to London to find Daniel Foe — Defoe's birth name — who publishes a version that erases her and ennobles Crusoe. Friday in Foe has had his tongue cut out. Derek Walcott's poem "Crusoe's Journal" (1965) and his play Pantomime (1978) work the same ground from the Caribbean side.
Postcolonial criticism has spent four decades unpicking how Defoe naturalised the colonial relation. The cumulative reading is that Robinson Crusoe is a foundational text of colonial ideology, in which the novel form was shaped to justify European possession of distant places.
And yet the desert island myth survives. Lord of the Flies, Cast Away, every reality television survival show — all Crusoe's descendants. Defoe encoded the colonial fantasy so deeply into the adventure story that three hundred years of criticism have not dislodged it from the imagination. The novel is the empire's nursery rhyme, and nursery rhymes are the part of the empire that lasts.
The Reading
Robinson Crusoe is the third son of a German merchant from Bremen who has settled in Hull and married into a respectable English family called Robinson. The boy, christened Robinson Kreutznaer, is afflicted from his earliest years with what Defoe calls "the wandering inclination." His father, an asthmatic old man confined to his chamber, summons him for a long and famous speech about the middle station of life — neither so high as to attract envy nor so low as to feel want — which the father insists is the happiest condition that human society affords. Robinson hears the speech, weeps, promises to obey, and within a few weeks goes down to Hull and boards a ship for London without telling his parents.
The first voyage is a disaster. A storm in Yarmouth Roads frightens him so badly that he resolves to go home, then a worse storm wrecks the ship altogether, and he reaches London on foot, ashamed and broke. He does not go home. He signs on instead with a Guinea trader and makes a voyage to the African coast, returning with a small fortune in gold dust and the conviction that he has found his trade. On the second Guinea voyage, off the coast of the Canaries, the ship is taken by Sallee rovers — Moorish corsairs operating out of Salé in Morocco — and Crusoe is enslaved at the port. He spends about two years there as the personal slave of a Moorish captain, fishing in the harbour and dreaming of escape. The escape, when it comes, involves stealing his master's longboat with a small Moorish boy called Xury, whom Crusoe persuades to swear loyalty by threatening to throw him overboard. They sail south along the Saharan coast, shooting lions and trading with frightened locals, until a Portuguese ship bound for Brazil picks them up. The captain is generous, buys Crusoe's boat and his guns at fair prices, and offers a smaller sum for Xury — with a promise to free the boy in ten years if he converts to Christianity. Crusoe, who has just escaped slavery himself, sells the slave who escaped with him. He takes the money.
In Brazil, Crusoe buys land and becomes a sugar planter near the Bay of All Saints in Bahia. The first year is hard; the second is better; by the fourth year he has acquired a Portuguese partner, an enslaved African workforce, an indentured European servant, and the prospect of becoming a wealthy man. He has reached, in other words, the middle station his father recommended, by a longer route than the father intended. And he is restless again. His neighbours, knowing his Guinea-coast experience, propose that he captain a private slaving voyage on their joint account: they will outfit a ship, he will sail to West Africa and bring back enslaved Africans for the plantations, and the cargo will be divided in fixed shares. The voyage is technically illegal under the licensed Portuguese trade, but everybody is doing it. Crusoe agrees, makes his will leaving the plantation to a trusted factor in the event of his death, and sails on the first of September 1659 — a date Defoe gives in full — bound for the Guinea coast on a slaving voyage.
The ship is caught in a hurricane in the Caribbean and driven for days before the wind. The crew tries to make for one of the small islands in the chain. Twelve days into the storm, the ship strikes a sandbank within sight of land, the longboat is launched, and within minutes a great wave overturns it. Crusoe alone is washed up alive on the beach. He spends the first night in a tree, terrified of wild animals, and discovers in the morning that the wreck has been driven nearer the shore by the tide. Over the next twelve days he makes repeated voyages out to her on a raft of his own construction, salvaging everything he can lift: planks and beams, casks of bread and rum, gunpowder and shot, muskets and pistols, carpenter's tools, sailcloth, ink and paper and a Bible, two cats and a dog, the captain's clothes, a hammock, and — in a much-quoted passage — a bag of money he initially smiles at as useless and then takes anyway. The thirteenth voyage is interrupted by a storm that finishes the ship, and after that the wreck disappears.
Crusoe builds himself a fortified shelter against a hill, with a tent of sailcloth inside a palisade of stakes driven into the ground, and gradually expands it into a cave. He keeps a journal in which he records every day's labour and every shift in his interior weather. He divides a sheet of paper into two columns headed "Evil" and "Good," and totals up his condition like a merchant balancing a ledger: he is cast on a desolate island, but he is alive; he is alone, but he is not starving; he has no clothes, but the climate is warm; he has no defence, but he sees no enemies. The exercise reassures him, and the habit of accounting becomes the structure of his sanity. He cuts notches on a great post to track the days, marking Sundays with a longer notch and the first of every month with a longer one still.
The methodical labour begins. He plants barley and rice from grain shaken out of an old sack he had used for chicken feed and discovers, with what he interprets as a providential thrill, that they grow. He learns to dry raisins from wild grapes. He captures a young goat and starts a herd. He builds a country bower in a more fertile valley, fences a paddock, makes pots of clay and bakes them in a kiln of his own contrivance, weaves baskets, sews clothes from goatskins. He builds a giant canoe from a single tree and discovers, after months of labour, that it is too heavy for him to drag to the water. He builds a smaller one. He makes an umbrella of skins. He bakes bread. Each of these enterprises is described in the patient, practical detail of a manual, and Defoe makes Crusoe's pride in them inseparable from his Protestant sense that industry is its own evidence of grace.
The interior weather is harder. Crusoe falls ill with a fever in his second year and, for the first time in the book, opens the Bible at random. The passage that finds him is from Psalm 50: Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. He reads it again, weeps, prays for the first time in his adult life, and dates his religious conversion to that night. From then on the journal becomes a record of providences as well as labours. He thanks God for the grain that grew, for the goat that did not escape, for the rain that fell when his crop needed it, for the storm that did not flatten his palisade. He develops a theology in which his exile is a punishment for disobedience to his father and an opportunity for repentance, and in which his survival is a daily mercy. Defoe presents this conversion without irony, and the reader is meant to take it straight: a man alone with the scriptures and a workshop has access to the only relationship that matters.
Years pass. Crusoe estimates them by his notched post, which grows longer than he is. Then, somewhere in the middle of the eleventh or twelfth year, walking on the shore on a part of the island he rarely visited, he sees a single human footprint in the sand. The famous passage that follows is a small masterpiece of psychological writing: Crusoe stares at it, looks behind him, looks every way, listens, sees nothing, then runs all the way back to his fortification convinced that the devil himself has come for him. He cannot sleep for nights. He digs additional trenches, plants a second hidden thicket of stakes, drives his goats inland, and lives for years in a state of low-grade siege against an enemy he has not seen. Eventually he discovers the truth: the island is visited periodically by canoes of mainland "savages" who use a particular beach for ritual cannibal feasts. He comes upon the remains of one such feast — bones, ash, half-buried skulls — and is sickened. He spends long passages of careful Protestant casuistry working out whether he has the moral right to attack them. They have not harmed him; they have not even seen him; their practices are abominable to him but are an established custom among themselves. He concludes, with the cautious legalism that is one of Defoe's signatures, that he has no commission to be their judge. He waits.
The waiting ends when he sees a fresh landing of about thirty cannibals from his concealment, with two prisoners, one of whom escapes during the killing and runs directly toward Crusoe's hiding place pursued by two of his captors. Crusoe shoots both pursuers, signals to the prisoner to come forward, and adopts him on the spot. He calls him Friday for the day of his deliverance and teaches him to say "Master." Friday is grateful in the most extravagant terms Defoe can devise — placing his head under Crusoe's foot, kissing the ground, pledging perpetual service. He is, the novel insists, young and handsome, with straight European-shaped features rather than what Defoe calls the "ugly yellow nauseous tawny" of a Brazilian. Crusoe begins his education at once. Friday learns English, learns to wear clothes, learns to eat goat-meat instead of human flesh, learns to handle a musket, learns the rudiments of Christianity. He turns out to be, by Crusoe's own admission, possibly the most cheerful, faithful, and obliging companion any man could wish for.
The two of them live in something like contentment for several years. Friday tells Crusoe, in his broken English, about his own people, about the wars between tribes on the mainland, about a group of bearded white men — Spaniards — who have been living among one of the inland nations after a shipwreck. Crusoe begins to plan an escape to the mainland. Before the plan can be executed, another canoe of cannibals lands with three prisoners, one of whom is a Spaniard. Crusoe and Friday rescue him, and another prisoner who turns out, astonishingly, to be Friday's own father. Crusoe sends the Spaniard and Friday's father back to the mainland in a canoe to negotiate with the surviving Spaniards for their joint emigration to the island, where Crusoe imagines establishing a small Christian colony under his governorship.
Before the Spaniards return, an English ship appears off the coast. A boat puts in carrying eleven men, three of whom are prisoners — the captain, his mate, and a passenger. The crew has mutinied and intends to maroon the captain on the island. Crusoe, after observing from concealment, makes contact with the captain, learns the situation, and offers his help on the condition that the captain restore him and Friday to England. Together they ambush the mutineers, kill or capture the leaders, retake the ship by stratagem, and execute or pardon the rest as Crusoe and the captain see fit. Crusoe is now, after twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days on the island, at last in a position to leave. He installs the worst of the mutineers as the new inhabitants of the island under instructions to live peaceably with the Spaniards when they arrive, hands over his stores and his livestock, gives the men a written account of his improvements, and sails for England with Friday and the rescued captain on 19 December 1686.
The voyage home takes most of a year. Crusoe arrives in England to find his parents long dead and his sisters scattered, but learns from his old Lisbon merchant friend that the Brazilian plantation has been honestly managed in his absence and has accumulated a substantial fortune for him. He travels to Lisbon to settle his accounts, reclaims his estate, and returns to England by an overland route across the Pyrenees in winter — a final adventure involving wolves and snowstorms that Defoe inserts almost as an afterthought. He marries, has three children, loses his wife, and finds himself unable to settle. The novel ends with Crusoe announcing that he has returned to the island once more as a private man to see how the colony he left there has prospered, and gesturing toward "further adventures" that Defoe would supply the same year in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
Friday accompanies Crusoe to England and remains with him as a servant for the rest of his life as far as the novel is concerned. He is mentioned in passing as having behaved bravely against the wolves in the Pyrenees. He does not marry, does not return to the mainland to find his father, does not become anything other than what Crusoe made him on the day of the rescue. The novel that gave him a name and a voice gives him no future. He is the empire's first great literary servant, and the empire was already learning, in 1719, how to ensure that its servants would keep no story of their own.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Two scholarly paperbacks are the standard recommendations. John Richetti's Penguin Classics edition (2003) is the most widely taught, with a substantial introduction and notes keyed to the novel's colonial and economic contexts. Thomas Keymer's Oxford World's Classics edition (2007), prepared with James Kelly, has the most rigorous textual apparatus and the most detailed annotation of Defoe's sources.
Edited and introduced by John Richetti. The widely taught Penguin Classics paperback, with commentary on the novel's place in the rise of the English novel and its colonial contexts.
Edited by Thomas Keymer and James Kelly. The scholarly standard, with a detailed introduction and extensive notes on Defoe's sources and historical context.
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