Introduction: Robinson Crusoe, Karl Marx and the critique of colonial violence

As we press on into the fourth century after the first publication of Robinson Crusoe, in which Daniel Defoe’s eponymous hero, Robinson Crusoe, continues to stand for the man alone on an island, variously governor-king and rugged individual survivor, it is an apt moment to reconsider the role he has taken up in our collective imagination. The four articles in this special focus issue take up their rereadings of Crusoe in light of 300 years of interpretation, the end of the era of European colonialism, and the advent of postcolonial thought. The by-now enormous scholarly literature built up around Crusoe speaks to his enduring appeal for academics, critics, creative writers, and even economists (Reddleman 2023, 465) and his popularity extends into popular culture, where a Google search reveals the tremendously rich afterlife of this character and his name. Crusoe is routinely mentioned in news and entertainment stories with even a passing suggestion of being isolated or marooned, survival, shipwreck, living on an island, or simply going on holiday. His name echoes through films, TV series, video games, board games, operettas and pantomimes, cartoons, holiday resorts, islands, airlines, artworks, and novels.

In this special focus issue, the emphasis is on Crusoe as the exemplary, now mythic, figure – or personification – of the emerging capitalist individual. The meme of the man alone on the island belies a richer and more troubling history and literary context, in which Defoe’s Crusoe is both enslaved and a trader in slaves (Pepperell 2023, 452), a privateer-pirate trading opium in Bengal (Hutnyk 2023, 428), and a racist crusader advocating for a new “holy war” against Muslims worldwide (Hund 2023, 442–443). Where Crusoe has popularly become a byword for “rugged individualism” and the (deeply asocial) fantasy of the “man alone”, these articles attend to the economic aspects of Crusoe’s time on the island, as well as his subsequent career, in the second and third Crusoe novels, in Asia.

Crusoe has also had an enduring role for economists, theorists, and other commentators as the figure of homo economicus, economic man, as has been widely noted (Hymer 2023; Moretti 2014; Whyte 2014). His historical position at the beginning of the novel as a cultural form that is particularly linked to the development of the bourgeois individual (Moretti 2014) enables a critique of the “rugged individual” as a fantasy of isolated self-sufficiency that is generated by capital’s drive to obscure and divert attention from its own workings.

The authors in this special focus issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing take up the legacy of Crusoe in the literary form of the “Robinsonade”, and re-evaluate the novel as a “symptomatic denial of colonial oppression” (Pepperell 2023, 450) with implications for reading Karl Marx’s Capital as an anti-colonial text: they share the view that Capital is intent on discovering and communicating the intrinsic links between capital’s functioning and its production of self-sufficiency as an idealized fantasy of life within the society of capital that is necessarily thwarted at every moment.

In “Robinson Crusoe: After the Island”, John Hutnyk argues “for making a postcolonial interpretation of Robinson Crusoe that seeks to retrieve Defoe’s critique of colonial violence, plunder, and war” (2023, 419). Hutnyk attends to Defoe’s “polemical strategy” in the three parts of the Crusoe trilogy, with a particular focus on the lesser-known second and third instalments, identifying a subtle advocacy against colonial wars and in favour of trade. Our understanding of Crusoe is expanded beyond his most well-known guise as the ur-castaway of the European imagination, to his subsequent career as a pirate-privateer voyaging in the footsteps of the “pirate-navigator-cartographer” (418) William Dampier, to India, South-East Asia, and China. Without offering Dampier as a “key” to Crusoe, Hutnyk carefully reads Defoe’s use and repurposing of the text into a new “traveller’s tale” in favour of colonial trade and against war.

Hutnyk also reads in Crusoe an opportunity to renew Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of postcoloniality as an alibi that works to deflect attention from the morphing of colonialism into neocolonialism. Through his careful use of polemical and satirical writing strategies, “Defoe’s satire offers ideological cover for colonial commerce while rejecting militarism” (Hutnyk 2023, 429). Hutnyk alerts us especially to the contemporary relevance of reading “book two” of Crusoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, and of the Strange Surprizing Accounts of His Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. Written by Himself (Defoe [1719] 2018). Here, we are denied the opportunity to indulge in abstracting the “island story” from the complexity and historical context of the whole, as Rousseau would later advocate (see Reddleman in this issue), and instead are invited to see Defoe reworking Crusoe’s outlook to offer “a panegyric in favour of colonial ideology” (Hutnyk 2023, 430).

Wulf Hund’s article “Crusoe’s Crusade: Marginalia to the War Against the Devil in Defoe’s Robinson” is translated into English from the original German by John Hutnyk. Chiming with Hutnyk’s argument, Hund proposes that, across the three volumes of the Crusoe novels and right from the start of book one (published in 1719), a “clandestine” programme of advocacy for colonial trade and “white supremacy” is put forward by Defoe via Crusoe. This programme is signalled in an encoded form in Robinson’s account of his origins on the very first page of the novel. His father was a “Foreigner of Bremen”, a successful merchant who settled in York, whose original name, Kreutznaer, prefigures Crusoe’s habit of using “divine providence” as an alibi for his exploitative economic activities. Hund also identifies Crusoe’s celebrated hard work on the island – his “infinite Labour [ … ] inexpressible Labour” (Defoe [1719] 2007, 108) – as a kind of performative cover for the exploitation of the enslaved people on his Brazilian plantation, which continues all the time he is there. This observation of the economic reality of Crusoe’s situation is also discussed in Claire Reddleman’s article in this issue. Hund argues that Crusoe’s “labour” is posed as a Lockean justification for the wealth he lays claim to after leaving the island, identifying this performance with Goffman’s famous, albeit 20th-century, notion of the presentation of the self on stage. This point is not a digression, but an articulation of one of capital’s most significant characteristics – its production of misleading, even perverse, forms of appearance, that direct attention away from capitalism’s real operations.

Hund follows the fortunes of Crusoe in his Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelic World (Defoe [1720] 2022) the second and third parts of the trilogy, which are little read today. John Hutnyk’s article also pursues this more global reading of Crusoe into the second and third instalments. For both Hund and Hutnyk, the value of this more expansive approach to reading is the opportunity to shed light on Defoe’s veiled programme of advocacy for colonial trade. This programme is not presented in straightforward terms. Instead, Crusoe “assumes the undivided role of the prophet of a worldwide Christian mission against paganism” (Hund 2023, 440), embarking on further travels round the Cape of Good Hope and on to Madagascar, India, and South-East Asia, before addressing himself to China and Russia. Crusoe articulates a sustained denunciation of, effectively, the whole Islamic sphere, condemning the “Mahometans” in vitriolic terms in order to establish the rightness of targeting them with “a supposed civilizing mission, [with] the result of calling for a new Holy War (‘crusade’)” (Hund 2023, 434). Similarly, the people and customs of China are depicted as ripe for the civilizing power of European capital. Ultimately, Hund argues, “Christianity, capitalism and colonialism appear as an indivisible conjunction. When Crusoe speaks of the devil, ultimately, he means a nefarious adversary to any development of profitable business” (442). Our customary focus on the “island story” serves to obscure both capital’s dynamic of misdirection, and Crusoe’s articulation of the “civilising mission” as an alibi for the expansion of European markets.

In Nicole Pepperell’s article in this issue, “‘To Dream of a Wildness Distant from Ourselves’: Capitalism, Colonialism and the ‘Robinsonade’”, questions of knowing and unknowing are also posed in relation to how the functioning, and the violence, of capital become recognizable to us. In common with Hutnyk’s article, Pepperell reads Robinson Crusoe as a cover, or alibi, for the covert promotion of colonial ideology. The focus here is on the first book, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Of York, Mariner: Who Lived Twenty Eight Years All Alone in an Un-Inhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; … Written by Himself (Defoe [1719] 2007). Defoe’s novel is positioned here in its context as the generator of countless Robinsonades, retellings of the story, usually pared back to its key episode of isolation, and often aimed at providing instruction and entertainment for younger readers. The trope of the Robinsonade is mobilized and critically expanded to encompass Karl Marx’s incisively irreverent attitude to it. The theme of the Robinsonade as a romp, an adventure, is expanded to consider it as a diverting strategy that misdirects our critical attention. Pepperell argues that Defoe’s presentation of Crusoe as this rugged individual is part of a strategy of irony, whose ultimate purpose is to forward a defence of the colonial project.

The representation of Crusoe as “an idealization of individual self-sufficiency” (Pepperell 2023, 3), Pepperell continues, is part of a multi-faceted strategy within the text of Robinson Crusoe, which is ultimately concerned with a dynamic of simultaneous exposition and disavowal of the colonial violence entailed in Crusoe’s position and in his accumulation of wealth and power. Defoe’s textual strategies are carefully interrogated by Pepperell, as they are also by Hutnyk and Hund in this special focus issue. Pepperell argues that Robinson Crusoe purposely intends to divert, or misdirect, readers’ attention from the ways in which capitalist social relations produce both the violence of colonial dispossession, and also the ‘ignorance’ of that violence enacted by the subjects of capital living in the colonial centre.

To this end, Pepperell sees Defoe going to great lengths to naturalize the relationship of enslavement that exists between Friday and Crusoe, thus obfuscating its underlying violence and social character. Further, Defoe disguises any connection between the wealth Crusoe accrues and the labour of other people, an issue which is also addressed in Reddleman’s article in this issue, where Crusoe’s ability to continue building up wealth from his Brazilian plantation is not, in practice, hindered by his absence for 28 years on the island. Pepperell observes the text’s tendency to simultaneously make explicit and to disavow Crusoe’s involvement in global economic networks, such that, even though we are shown again and again how dependent he is on the labour and generosity of other people, his successes always end up being framed as to his credit alone.

Pepperell ultimately directs our attention to the question of how ignorance and disavowal of the real relations of production continue to be produced. In this regard, the concept of “epistemologies of ignorance” addresses the simultaneous, or double, production of both useful knowledge and occlusion and denial. As Pepperell argues, “Read together, the two texts [Robinson Crusoe and Capital] highlight the role of denial – not as an individual, psychological dynamic, but as a collective social one” (2023, 460).

In Reddleman’s article in this issue, “Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: Refugio by Roger Palmer and the Marxian Theory of Economic Character Masks”, we look again at Crusoe as the rugged castaway, this time thinking with an art installation. Here, the tradition of writings and reworkings that place Crusoe in the Pacific, instead of the Atlantic, is considered. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s (1986) postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that, again, obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.

In all four articles, Crusoe’s familiar role as the man alone is put under critical pressure. The materials and understandings that are so often lost to readers as a consequence of Crusoe’s abstraction from his fictional and literary contexts are emphasized across the articles in this special focus issue. Hund recovers an understanding of Crusoe as racist crusader and global capitalist, and articulates Defoe’s programme of subtle advocacy in favour of colonial trade. This connects with Hutnyk’s argument that reading Defoe from a postcolonial perspective uncovers his satirical strategy of advocacy for trade and against war. Whereas colonialism is always a fundamentally economic process, the postcolonial signals not the end of exploitation, but rather its shift of form. Pepperell also scrutinizes Defoe’s strategies for misdirecting readers’ attention away from the true nature of capitalist exploitation, theorizing this dissimulation along with Marx as part of capital’s production of misleading appearance forms. The play of knowing and not knowing about colonial violence is also thematized in Reddleman’s argument that the Pacific Robinsonades disavow Crusoe’s economic function as a capitalist and slave trader. With Coetzee’s Foe, restoring Crusoe to the Atlantic context rearticulates his economic interdependence and refutes the colonial and postcolonial fantasy of self-sufficiency. Ultimately we see that the fantasy of homo economicus is a product not only of its time, but of capital’s needs – to maintain for its own survival a denial of its globalizing violence, exploitation, and continuous disruption.

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Claire Reddleman

Claire Reddleman teaches digital humanities and art history at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (2018), which theorizes abstract modes of viewing with artworks and maps. Her articles have appeared in Humanities, GeoHumanities, and Socialism and Democracy; her creative work in Living Maps Review; and a recent book chapter addresses cartographic depictions of the former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia. Her book Pennine Street: A Cartographic Fiction is forthcoming, and combines creative writing and original artwork to critique capitalist abstraction. She is writing about Robinson Crusoe’s fantasies of surveillance and the voice of the Other.