Dec 23, 2009

Robinson Crusoe | Robinson Crusoe: A Guidebook for English Colonialism

In the following essay, Jeremy W. Hubbell views Robinson Crusoe as a guidebook for English colonialism.

Today, the typical reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe assumes that the novel is central to the bourgeois myth. However, as Diana Spearman and others have pointed out, the story of a man in isolation for twenty-four years is a strange myth for a class of people dependent on an economic system that requires people to interact with one another through an economic medium.

Instead, Defoe's novel meditates on the redeeming qualities offered by the labor of colonialism for the Englishman. Work was the way to civilize the wilderness of the New World and achieve peace...