IN THE MIDST of a storm off the coast of eastern England, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) struggles to describe his experience. He alludes to the later storms he will encounter, downplaying the present storm as “nothing like I have seen many times since; no, nor like what I saw a few days after” (10). Retrospective narration is crucial to Crusoe’s storytelling, both as a means of signaling how risk escalates in successive storms and situating storms as significant events in the novel. After the storm subsides, Crusoe’s more seasoned shipmate ridicules him as a “fresh-water sailor,” unable to recognize a real storm, and offers him enough punch to “drown all [his] repentance” (RC 10). Only in retrospect will Crusoe read the storm as an instance of special providence, as God’s direct intervention in his life.³

In this scene, and in many others in his literary fiction, Defoe draws explicitly on the terminology of atmospheric disturbances he first established in The Storm: Or, a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704). Defoe assembled a collection of eyewitness accounts to commemorate the Great Storm of November 26-27, 1703, a storm that racked up an estimated death toll of eight thousand in Southern England and Wales (Golinski 42). In The Storm, Defoe includes a chart comparing sailors’ nicknames for varying degrees of storms with laymen’s terms for distinguishing a gust of wind from a full-blown tempest, suggesting that exaggerated accounts of storms dating from “the terrible Tempest that scattered Julius Caesar’s Fleet” might be reexamined in light of sailors’ “Ignorance” about what a storm entails (24). The inexperienced Robinson Crusoe might indeed be the “South Country Sailor” described in The Storm who cowers at a gale of wind. Defoe dedicates much of his literary career to the task of discerning not only what can be defined as a storm, but how to interpret storms as objects, at once literary, natural historical, and providential. This essay explores numerous storm forms that swirl together as representational issues in Defoe’s work, combining to form the basis for a method of assemblage that Defoe developed early in his writing career as the centerpiece of The Storm and then integrated into two of his major novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724). I argue that Defoe’s compilation of eyewitness accounts allows him to articulate an empiricist theory of how a novel might be assembled in the same way that a weather system is reported, proceeding from multiple points of view to forms or patterns. To see the storm as a sign or token of disaster—to apprehend extreme weather as laden with meaning—reveals how analogical interpretation operates together with the new science in Defoe’s novelistic representation of atmospheric tumult.

As a text that aspires to be political tract, sermon, and scientific study, the most noteworthy aspect of The Storm is the multiplicity of voices found in its pages. In compiling reports of the Great Storm, Defoe believed himself to be participating in the construction of an observational method for the eighteenth century. Defoe suggests:

Tis impossible to describe the general Calamity, and the most we can do, is to lead our reader to supply by his Imagination what we omit; and to believe, that as the Head of the particulars is thus collected, an infinite Variety at the same time happened in every place, which cannot be expected to be found in this Relation. (Storm 109)

Ilse Vickers notes that Defoe frequently includes accounts that explicitly stress truthfulness, or else introduces accounts himself from persons whose authority will not be questioned and then supplements these accounts with excerpts from the Royal Society’s scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions (Vickers 65).² Following the Royal Society’s empiricist tradition, Defoe stresses his commitment to a distributed model of truth: “I cannot be so ignorant of my own Intentions, as not to know, that in many Cases I shall act the Divine, and draw necessary practical Inferences from the extraordinary Remarkables of this book” (Storm 4). To “act the Divine,” in this case, is not only to act as arbiter of truth, but to consider which fictional structures are most appropriate for relaying “extraordinary Remarkables.” Lennard Davis suggests that Defoe justified the interpretive liberties he took by placing his work in the realm of parable and allegory (157). Similarly, Wolfram Schmidgen writes that Defoe’s “goal to represent the heterogeneity and multiplicity of experience itself” counters the idea that the novel form privileges the individual and its single focalizing perspective (96). By examining the assemblage of perspectives present in The Storm, we might locate the origins for a more capacious idea of narrative form.

Defoe’s ability to survey the intricate interconnectedness of the storm is partially a product of his own varied background. Defoe’s biographers assert that he seriously thought about becoming a clergyman in 1681, only to turn enthusiastically towards business and land speculation. By 1703, Defoe was a notorious political pamphleteer, imprisoned for his seditious parody of High Church Tories, The Shortest Way with Dissenters. Only days after Defoe emerged from prison, the storm swept through. The Storm is committed to documenting local details that would have been relevant to Defoe’s neighbors: the numbers of trees uprooted, chimney stacks blown down, the ships wrecked on the Thames. Defoe, who had lost his profitable tile business while he was imprisoned, darkly documents “the sudden Rise of the Price of Tiles” after the storm (Storm 57-58). Robert Markley suggests that The Storm’s interest in local conditions reflects how “eighteenth-century philosophers were working within causal frameworks that were still overwhelmingly local” (113). Yet The Storm also demonstrates Defoe’s broader epistemological concerns via the creation of data: Markley argues that Defoe’s recognition that representation will always be inadequate in conveying exact particulars led to his innovative use of statistics to model the causes and effects of the storm (105). As Defoe’s narrative instincts developed, so did his forward-leaning views of weather as a system.

The broader transition in meteorological theories taking place at the beginning of the eighteenth century provides parallels to Defoe’s own interest and involvement in weather studies. Meteorological phenomena often inform experimental literary forms in the early eighteenth century. In our current age of anxieties about extreme weather and an unsettled atmosphere, a number of historians have begun identifying this long-standing, deep connection between weather and literary forms. Arden Reed, writing about Romanticism, documents how the eighteenth-century obsession with “meteors” seeps into religion, poetics, and language, only to vanish once the Enlightenment emphasis on “the light of reason” takes hold (38). Jesse Oak Taylor applies a similar argument to the Victorian novel, attending to the “literal and literary sense” of atmosphere “inhering in the air shared by the world, the text, and the critic” (7). Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, linking eighteenth-century meteorological events to Defoe’s work, argues that “uniquely reflexive forms of knowledge” accompany atmospheric anomalies (98). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was widely held that human time and the age of the earth could be deciphered by reading the prophetic books of the Bible (Jacob 35). Vladimir Janković holds that, over the course of the eighteenth century, the practice of reporting unusual weather events—what he terms meteoric reportage—regularly incorporated both divine and naturalistic discourses (5). The tradition of occasional meditation, first popular among Puritans and seventeenth-century diarists, gives some insight into how Defoe integrated this brand of empiricism into his work. Occasional meditations allowed those with even a little familiarity with biblical tropes to find meaning in everyday experiences with the natural world. J. Paul Hunter argues that this reading practice generates an excess of meaning, and he uses extreme weather as an example: “A storm could mean that the Whigs were wrong or the Tories, that Sabbath breaking had to stop or reformers of manners had gone too far, that the stage was corrupt or the theater of politics debased” (207).³ In other words, the religious themes in Defoe’s stories overlap with the naturalistic models central to the new science and its associated economic logic.”⁴ Defoe’s understanding of weather as a system, in line with the traditions of meteoric reportage and occasional meditation, knits together religious and secular discourses by juxtaposing different responses to the same events. This is the narrative technique I call an assemblage.

The term “assemblage” has been used recently in eighteenth-century and ecocritical scholarship alike, though the precise way that it has been employed varies according to context. My reading here is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage as updated by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things: a feedback loop between climate and human enterprises that cannot be untangled. Bennett offers the example of an electrical power grid as an assemblage, a “material cluster of charged parts that have [become] affiliated,” even as “energies and factions…fly out from it and disturb it from within (24). In the same sense, Bennett writes, a hurricane can be classified as an assemblage. Sean Silver’s recent article explores how early eighteenth-century media forms, most notably the newspaper, gather up individual, fragmentary accounts of the Great Storm and churn them into an “emergent whole” (503). Silver, characterizing Defoe himself as “part of [a] weather-writing assemblage” ushering in the new science, notes that The Storm’s signature method of balancing the “universality of the tempest’s destruction” with specific eyewitness accounts proved vastly popular with his public audience (506). These arguments, taken together, suggest that the relationship between weather systems and literary form might productively be summed up as a kind of assemblage. For Defoe, certainly, describing the multiplicity of the Great Storm from a first-person perspective allowed him to conceptualize how a novel might operate in the same way.

Robinson Crusoe’s Storm Theory

Thus far, I have been suggesting that Defoe’s early experience of the storm form, as a site and source of narrative tension, shaped his choices as a writer of narrative fiction. From his retrospective position as the narrator of his life, Crusoe is in a position to assess the significance of and impose structure on his “individual experiences,” or the various storms he encounters. Crusoe readily accepts his shipmate’s dismissal of the storm because interpreting the weather as a necessary risk inherent to commercial activity—in naturalistic rather than providential terms—allows him to justify going back to sea. But even as Crusoe likens the sea’s returned “smoothness of surface” to his own vanished “fears and apprehensions,” he confesses to the reader that the threat of the storm as providential punishment roils in his mind (RC 10).

A model of climate that stresses special providence, with its emphasis on the unpredictability of God’s wrath, thwarts the modern adventure capitalist who sees storms as the unavoidable risks of plying overseas trade routes. Storms evoke an Old Testament God: the voice in the whirlwind addressing Job, the impetus for the whale swallowing Jonah. Despite his predisposition towards the providential, Crusoe must frame the storm as a risk in his speculative ventures in order to resume his mercantile voyages. He achieves this framing through retrospection, imposing a naturalistic reading of events over the initial providential interpretation. As a result, we find that Crusoe’s appeals to God, his promises to repent and return to his father’s middle-class home, dissipate “as the sea was returned to its smoothness of surface and settled calmness by the abatement of the storm (RC 9-10). Crusoe’s “apprehensions of being swallow’d up by the sea” forgotten and the “current of [his] former desires return’d,” he rejects his resolution to return home as a “true repenting Prodigal.” A naturalistic interpretation of storms is here linked to the logic of capitalism. In minimizing the storm as a gust of wind, Crusoe justifies his desire to return to sea and rise above the “middle station of life” (RC 6). Defoe’s belief that the knowledge of reality sufficient for economic success is developed through an assemblage of first-person perspectives, a conviction developed in response to storm reportage, sparks in Crusoe a desire to repeatedly test providence.⁵

Crusoe’s retrospective analysis of the storm introduces a different mode of assemblage: a collection of Crusoe’s evolving perspectives on the storm from divergent temporalities, most significantly featuring his anticipation of the storm to come. “For if I would not take this as a deliverance,” Crusoe muses, “the next was to be such a one as the worst and most harden’d wretch among us would confess both the danger and mercy” (RC 10). Crusoe cannot recognize the role of providence in a single storm, but looking back, he can see that a cluster of storms amount to a series of trials. The reader will not be permitted to leisurely arrive at the same conclusion. Rather, Defoe introduces the complexity of multiple storms before they actually occur in the narrative, allowing Crusoe to map out the ways he experiences disaster in different time scales: in the midst of a storm; in the aftermath of a storm as safety allows him to reflect on the future; in the far future, as experience allows him to look back. Between the first and second storm, Crusoe both gains the naturalistic knowledge that the “South Country Sailor” in The Storm lacks and develops the interpretive skills to navigate between types of knowledge; that is, he can simultaneously tell the difference between types of gales and interpret their broader significance in his life. By fluctuating between narrative tenses, he gives the impression of being caught in synchronous storms that collectively illustrate a distinctive providential pattern in the novel.

This principle of temporal assemblage operates in a similar manner in the second storm, “a terrible storm indeed” that Crusoe encounters only a few days after returning to sea (RC 11). Terrified by his previous storm experience, Crusoe lies “stupid” in his cabin and “cannot describe” his temper: “I could ill resume the first penitence which I had so apparently trampled upon; and hardened myself against,” he says, contemplating how his late rejection of divine agency makes his repentance inauthentic. The shipmaster, by contrast, has no such qualms, simultaneously “vigilant to the business of preserving the ship” and softly praying for God’s mercy. Though the rest of the crew unwittingly shifts between naturalistic and providential models, cutting the mast and engaging in fervent prayer, Crusoe finds these modes to be irreconcilable. No wonder that when Crusoe dramatically swoons in the midst of pumping water from the ship, a fellow sailor kicks him aside with his foot and takes up the task. Meditating on the feasibility of authentic storm repentance in the midst of a storm makes Crusoe an excellent philosopher and—as his shipmates make clear—a poor sailor.

Crusoe’s need to make sense of his past actions is often in tension with the patterns he perceives. Indeed, in contrast to a mode of assemblage that features a collection of eyewitness accounts, Crusoe’s retrospective perspectives can be revised to impose a pattern on otherwise unconnected events. Storms indisputably factor centrally in the story of Crusoe’s life, specifically, in the way he connects disparate moments into a coherent narrative. By recording storms, he can track a series of overlapping patterns that give his life special significance and then retrospectively assemble these patterns, carefully considering how time and wisdom have changed his perspective. This is not to say that the future version of Crusoe has all the answers. In one retrospective musing, Crusoe “knows not what to call” his desire to return to ship and sea “nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us to be the instruments of our own self-destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open” (RC 13). Here, there is a tension between the unknowability of storm and the patterns he attempts to impose on his experience. Shipping out to sea, time after time, Crusoe is unsure whether he returns to face the storm on his own volition or meets with “decreed unavoidable misery,” the inevitable outcome his father warns against (RC 14). In attempting to reconcile his obstinacy with what has been “decreed,” he again speculates that the two can be reconcilable, as long as every action he takes is part of a providential plan.

The shipmaster, as a witness to the storm alongside Crusoe, provides yet another example of Defoe’s assemblage model in action. Crusoe resolves to treat the voyage following the second storm as a sort of experiment, telling his shipmaster “how I had come this voyage only for a trial, in order to go farther abroad” (RC 14). Crusoe’s foolhardiness shocks the shipmaster, who has no desire to be a casualty of Crusoe’s storm study and tells him so: “You ought never to go to sea any more, you ought to take this as a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man” (RC 14). Simultaneously, in offering Crusoe this interpretive reading, the shipmaster draws on the understanding of extreme weather Janković calls meteoric reportage, or a premodern understanding of weather events as omens (3). Though the shipmaster has encountered his own fair share of stormy weather, he makes a neat distinction between encountering disaster as a matter of course and testing Providence out of perverse curiosity. He speculates that Crusoe is following the disastrous template set by the Biblical character Jonah, whose defiance of God nearly killed an entire ship’s crew.⁶ If Crusoe persists in exploring the science of Providence, he will be sure to see “a visible hand of Heaven” acting against him (RC 14).

The shipmaster’s biblical interpretation of the storm increasingly vied with naturalistic accounts of extreme weather over the course of the eighteenth century. We might assume that Defoe, who frequently documented the activities of the Royal Society, would subscribe wholesale to a naturalistic interpretation of the weather. But as we have seen, Crusoe’s naturalistic curiosity leads him to test providentialism as a hypothesis, not as a ground of faith. Crusoe’s retrospective analysis of his desire to return to sea, the “over-ruling decree,” is also the reason he gives for tinkering with divine plans. Though he heeds the shipmaster’s warning for some time, taking a land-based route to London, a combination of greed and curiosity causes him to seek out another voyage bound for the coast of Africa. Here, the “over-ruling decree” is named more precisely as Crusoe’s “wild and undigested notion of raising [a] fortune” (RC 15). A ship captain offers Crusoe free passage after hearing him express his desire to see the world, finally making him into “both a sailor and a merchant.” To be a sailor, Crusoe suggests, is to uncritically indulge in the naïve travel lust his father condemns; to be a merchant is to capitalize on the unspoiled locales he visits. This will be the single voyage Crusoe considers a success, though he is careful to remind the reader that the shipmaster’s prophecy remains valid: every journey he attempts is plagued with troubles ranging from heat sickness to pirate attacks. Far from dissuading Crusoe from future voyages, these misfortunes instill in him the near maniacal obsession to “preserve his effects”—a tendency that will allow him to prosper from afar after his shipwreck (RC 16). Crusoe’s financial success forces his admission that he craves the excitement of a voyage, despite its attendant hazards. Crusoe’s habit of confronting risk head-on helps him survive as a trader in Africa, escape slavery in Morocco, and finally reap profits as a planter in Brazil. Crusoe’s success in Brazil forces his admission that he craves the excitement of a voyage, despite its attendant hazards. “Raising [a] fortune” is no longer a concern, but the “overruling decree” remains.

As an experienced sailor, Crusoe instinctively draws on the perspectives of his fellow shipmates. Crusoe’s inevitable return to sea is met with a “violent hurricane or tournado [that] took us quite out of our knowledge,” placing himself among a collective of sailors all unable to diagnose and therefore cope with the storm (RC 34). Initially, it is not clear why this particular storm baffles the crew, particularly since Crusoe casually and clinically documents the storm’s trajectory from southeast to northeast and labels it as a “hurricane or tournado.” But tracing Defoe’s particular fascination with hurricanes and tornadoes back to 1703 makes Crusoe’s point more evident. Indeed, the Great Storm, the center of Defoe’s early storm inquiries, was a hurricane. In The Storm, Defoe speculates that such storms were made up of “A Collection of Materials … from the Continent of America,” providing insight into how hurricanes were perceived as hybrid phenomenon; a “Confluence of Vapours” raised from a series of foreign lakes and seas and assembled by God “till they made a sufficient Army duly proportion’d to the Expedition design’d” (Storm 48). A hurricane defies knowledge precisely because it combines disparate particles and thus violates the “Chain of natural Causes.” It is no coincidence that the formation of a hurricane, described in this way, mimics Defoe’s narrative method of juxtaposing multiple perspectives, or that a second hurricane immediately following the first propels Crusoe’s plot forward: while attempting to steer northwest towards Barbados, the ship is drastically swept off course by a storm that sinks his ship, kills his shipmates, and maroons him on an island.

The retrospective tense described thus far is the vantage from which Crusoe narrates his story. Once on shore, however, Crusoe carefully assembles his storm observations in a journal that contains yet another retrospective vantage point. Containing diligent reports on his stock of provisions, sudden rainstorms, and seasonal changes, Crusoe’s island “journal of every Day’s Employment” illustrates how naturalistic and providential language overlap for the land-bound survivor as well as the experienced sailor (RC 51). Jan Golinski finds that the mundane observations of seasonal patterns recorded in eighteenth-century almanacs emphasized the “overall timeliness of British weather,” in contrast to sudden violent storms that lacked coherent explanations (104). The form of the almanac, read in this sense, de-emphasizes abnormal weather events along with an analogical worldview. Lewis takes this reasoning one step further, proposing that as almanacs were discarded yearly, so their specific worldview was abandoned for a newer model (152). Temporarily abandoning the tendency to view storms as preternatural signs, Crusoe instead turns toward his journal as a means of deciphering meteorological order on the island. Tellingly, Crusoe first narrates the “dreadful Storm” that left him shipwrecked and then claims to “copy” his account into the Journal—and in doing so, leaves out his initial affective experience of the storm. Crusoe cannot assimilate the storm experience into the accounts of regularized weather contained in his journal.

Crusoe’s journal would first seem to align with the naturalistic almanac, but in Crusoe’s hands, it becomes a form for reading special providence. Through retrospective narration, Defoe explores how naturalistic knowledge interacts with Crusoe’s reflections on the patterns of Providence. Crusoe uses the last of his ink to map out a “strange concurrence of days, in the day various Providences which befel me” (RC 106).⁷ The first of Crusoe’s coincidences appears to be a straightforward consequence for disregarding his father’s prophecy: the same day of the year he ran away to sea is the same day he was captured and made into a slave. The remaining two coincidences correspond more directly to Crusoe’s storm experiences. One year to the day after Crusoe is spared by the storm in Yarmouth Roads, he makes his escape from captivity with Xury. Most significantly, Crusoe reports, he was born on the same day he was shipwrecked on the island, “so that my wicked life and solitary life began both on a day” (RC 106). Some of the strongest evidence that Robinson Crusoe is a novel invested in the principle of assemblage can be located in this section, in which Crusoe interprets a series of natural accidents as collectively illustrating the workings of providence. In deciphering the sign of the storm, Crusoe registers how religious belief is enmeshed with scientific truth.

While Crusoe (as narrator) continues to reexamine his life through a providential microscope, Defoe (as author) appears to call into question his protagonist’s belief in special providence. Before mapping out the marvelous coincidences that make up his life, Crusoe admits that he “did not really know what any of the days were” and “found at the end of my account I had lost a day or two in my reckoning” (RC 83). At the heart of the ideologies that shape Defoe’s fiction is this central contradiction: Crusoe’s life is leading towards a clearly defined resolution, a “concurrence of days,” but his calculations are off. Crusoe’s gall in claiming God’s particularized interference in his life needles Charles Gildon, writer of an indignant “Epistle to Daniel Defoe” (1719), who insists that the “Coining of Providences” in Robinson Crusoe borders on the absurd, particularly “making Providence raise a storm, cast away some ships, and damage many more, meerly to fright him from going to Sea” (8). By calling the dates into question, however, Defoe leaves the reader to determine the import of Crusoe’s coincidences. Defoe’s scrutiny of these overlapping modes reveals the storm to be an inherently literary phenomenon. Analogy remains relevant to interpretations of the storm—and thus to Defoe—because analogy-making is a form of narrative. Prompted by the shipmaster to view himself as a character in a biblical drama, Crusoe spends the rest of the narrative trying with varying degrees of success to read the natural world.

Storm Repentance in Roxana

Whereas Crusoe, from his retrospective position as the narrator of his life, is in a position to ponder the significance of successive storms, the specter of a single storm haunts Roxana long after it occurs, as a sign that providential justice will follow her to the end of her life. The storm occurs as Roxana journeys from France to Rotterdam, attempting to elude a plot to strip her of her wealth. In the midst of the storm, she observes her servant, Amy, fervently praying for salvation. Upon assessing Amy’s repentance as an appropriate reaction to near-certain death and considering that her own sins are more numerous, Roxana makes “an abundance of Resolutions, of what a Life I wou’d live, if it should please God but to spare my Life this one time” (Roxana 129). On one level, Roxana’s repentance is sincere. Looking back on a series of choices to “prostitute myself for Gain,” she believes “it wou’d not be possible that I shou’d be the same Creature again,” imagining the storm as a turning point in a life previously dedicated to material greed. Yet after landing safely on shore, she is equally horrified to acknowledge her repentance as a frantic scrabbling for salvation such “as a Criminal has at the Place of Execution, who is sorry, not that he has committed the Crime, but sorry that he is to be Hang’d for it” (Roxana 129). Though Roxana’s “Storm-Repentance” wears off, she develops a belief that a storm awaits her, the “Clouds thicken[ing]” about her as her lies are exposed (Roxana 296). This is familiar territory for Defoe, who similarly frames the Storm of 1703 with “Two Great Storms; One past, and the Other to come”: the famous flood found in the Scripture and the storm of God’s final judgment (Storm 17). Roxana relies on her knowledge of the storm, a mass of supporting perspectives cobbled together from various versions of her past, present, and future self, to anticipate the punishment she believes will come to pass at the end of her narrative.

Before the storm, Roxana acts on a version of Crusoe’s “overruling decree” to secure wealth for herself. She recounts for the reader how she has risen from the role of abandoned wife, surrounded by starving children, to become a powerful courtesan frequented by the Prince. Midway through the novel, Roxana encounters the first legitimate threat to her financial stability in the form of a jeweler who threatens to expose her identity and take away the jewels she inherited from a previous paramour. She develops a plan to flee France, aided by a Dutch merchant who secures her passage on a ship. Once on board, Roxana gratefully reflects on how her friendship with the merchant has spared her from great trouble, without crediting providential design. The narrator, a future version of Roxana, grimly notes that:

had I any Religion, or any Sence of a Supreme Power managing, directing, and governing in both Causes and Events in this World, such a Case as this wou’d have given any-body room to have been very thankful to the Power who had not only put such a Treasure into my Hand, but given me such an Escape from the Ruin that threaten’d me. (Roxana 121)

Looking back on her lack of comprehension, Roxana suggests that God serves a dual function, not only plucking her from danger but bestowing on her financial rewards in the form of “Treasure.” Roxana’s retrospective reflection that she has been “preserv’d from Destruction” by “second Causes,” or God working through the merchant, sets up her brush with “Storm-Repentance” only a few pages later (Roxana 121). Before the storm, she is unable to discern the invisible hand of Providence steering her towards both fortune and disaster.

Instead, boarding the ship for her journey, Roxana views herself as author of her own fate. Glimpsing her native land while at sea, Roxana impulsively wishes that “a Storm wou’d rise, that might drive the Ship over to the Coast of England” (Roxana 122). Obligingly, a storm appears, though to accomplish different narrative ends. Roxana’s first reaction, rather than fear, is exasperation at “how foolish it was to wish myself out of the Way of my Business” (Roxana 123). However implausible it might appear in a realist novel, Roxana momentarily indulges the thought that she is the author of the storm. This is a natural extension of Crusoe’s belief in special providence, as satirized in the “Epistle to Daniel Defoe.” Not only does Roxana suspect the storm was intended for her, but she suggests that her errant thoughts have created it. Yet Roxana’s fundamental misunderstanding of providence, as she herself has pointed out, leads her to neglect the web of weather patterns and divine circumstances that have led her to this moment. This is Defoe poking fun at a brand of realism that fails to look beyond second causes, a story that traces all agency back to the protagonist. Roxana may begin as this type of character, but the storm alerts her to the disconcerting possibility that her life follows a providential pattern.

If Roxana’s initial reaction to the storm is a narcissistic consideration of her influence on the weather, her second, more considered response is influenced by her longtime companion and servant, Amy. Amy serves a position similar to the ship-master of Robinson Crusoe, another perspective out of which a proper interpretation of the storm can be assembled. “If I am drown’d, I am damn’d!” is Amy’s refrain, accompanied by a recitation of her sins: “I have been a Whore to two Men, and have liv’d a wretched abominable life of Vice and Wickedness for fourteen Years” (Roxana 125). Listening to Amy’s performative repentance, Roxana revises her own reaction. Roxana’s version of repentance is a negotiation, a commitment to “spend a great deal of what I had thus wickedly got, in Acts of Charity, and doing Good,” should God spare her life (Roxana 126). Roxana’s providentialism thus actively attends to an empiricist mode that focuses on the usable application of Christian hermeneutics. And yet Amy goes farther still, resolving to “lead a new Life, if God wou’d spare her but this time,” and falling “flat upon the Ground” to thank Him for “Deliverance from the Sea” (Roxana 127). Juxtaposing Amy’s repentance with Roxana’s more resourceful response serves a twofold purpose. One, Defoe shows Roxana self-consciously amending her account in an attempt to emulate Amy, layering a second perspective onto the first-person reportage. Second, Defoe treats Amy and Roxana’s “exact” and “curious” reactions in the same way that he compiles eyewitness accounts in The Storm, comparing multiple voices that coalesce in a single truth: the language of commercial trade informs a providential understanding of disaster.⁸

One of Roxana’s chief narrative concerns is to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that her commercial values are closely intertwined with the workings of providence. The retrospective first-person narration framing the storm episode describes Roxana’s blithe lack of concern with “second causes.” That is to say, the pre-storm Roxana fails to understand how God works through human actions or natural occurrences. When the ship manages to make landing in the English harbor of Harwich, Roxana’s fear for her life is replaced with the dull dread that she has no system of belief, and thus no means of understanding the overarching structure of her life. “I had no thorow effectual Repentance; no Sight of my Sins in their proper Shape; no View of a Redeemer, or Hope in him: I had only such a Repentance as a Criminal has at the Place of Execution,” she confides, memorably labeling her false contrition “Storm-Repentance” (128-129). Roxana’s repentance is hollow because she lacks an observational method, a means of assembling her experiences in a meaningful way. Roxana’s naturalistic way of understanding her good fortune is tested when she impulsively turns to providence in the middle of the storm. “Storm-Repentance,” read in this sense, is a pivotal turning point in Roxana’s understanding of how to construct the narrative of her own life.

However, Roxana acknowledges the likelihood that she will never be able to fully convey her experience through “Words,” given the ontological excess produced by the storm. Looking back, she describes how her “Horrour in the time of the Storm” takes the form of “a kind of Stupidity…a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears” (Roxana 129). Recall that Crusoe makes a similar observation about how a storm leaves him silent and “stupid” in his cabin. Later, describing the storm that leaves him shipwrecked on the island, Crusoe suggests that “It is not easy for any one, who has not been in the like condition, to describe or conceive the consternation of men in such circumstances, we knew nothing where we were, or upon what land it was we were driven” (RC 36). We can trace this language earlier still to Defoe’s initial analysis of the Storm of 1703: “Horror and Confusion seiz’d upon all, whether on Shore or at Sea: No Pen can describe it, no Tongue can express it, no Thought conceive it, unless some of those who were in the Extremity of it” (Storm 53). Defoe insists that the attempt to document the storm, though inherently flawed, is crucial to “transmit the Memory of so signal a Judgment to Posterity” (Storm 64). Roxana’s inability to call up words is the most authentic part of her storm interpretation, the truest thing that a reader can learn about what it is like to live through a storm at sea. Defoe makes the now-characteristic move to “lead our Reader to supply by his Imagination what we omit,” implying that a careful reader will be able to discern a central vector of truth-telling in the midst of half-truths and lies (Storm 109).

This larger project of Defoe’s, the desire to provide a true and exact report of disaster through assemblage, provides insight into why Roxana continually returns to the storm in her narrative. Recounting the incident to the Dutch merchant, Roxana attempts to articulate why the storm made a lasting impression: “Death in any Shape has some Terror in it; but in the frightful figure of a Storm at Sea, and a sinking Ship, it comes with a double, a trebble, and indeed, an inexpressible Horrour…I desire to die in a calm, if I can” (Roxana 137). Defoe closes The Storm with an anecdote that expounds on Roxana’s fears, describing the plight of two men on board a ship homeward bound from the West Indies during the 1703 storm. The two, a ship captain and surgeon, make the decision to kill themselves with their pistols rather than face the uncertainty of dying slowly on the sinking ship. Noting what might be the most spectacular failure of interpretation, Defoe adds that God directed the ship safely into port, just in time for the dying captain to regret his hasty action (Storm 180). The decision to stay put and trust in divine providence, Defoe suggests, requires unbearable epistemological uncertainty that Roxana finds more dreadful than certain death. Defoe’s own experience of the storm suggests that his own faith was tested as his family chose to remain huddled in a collapsing brick house rather than risk being struck by airborne tiles and dangerous debris outside (Storm xii). Defoe soberly documents the collapse of brick chimneys over thirty times in The Storm, exploring how a different outcome might very well have been possible.⁹

Crusoe’s tendency to regard storms as naturalistic occurrences, necessary to confront in order to gain capital, is subverted by Roxana’s belief that God’s storm will be her final punishment. While Roxana retrospectively addresses how a “Supreme Power” governs her narrow escapes from disaster, she shifts to an anticipatory mode when she admits to the reader that she expects divine judgment to eventually return in the shape of a storm:

In a word, it never Lightn’d or Thunder’d but I expected the next Flash wou’d penetrate my Vitals, and melt the Sword (Soul) in this Scabbard of Flesh; it never blew a Storm of Wind, but I expected the Fall of some Stack of Chimneys, or some Part of the House wou’d bury me in its Ruins; and so of other things. (Roxana 260)

Roxana describes a constant state of disorientation, a paralyzing “stupidity” that compresses time to a moment in which her life was in peril. She links her turmoil to her “cursed ill-gotten wealth” and, specifically, the prospect of growing wealthier still (Roxana 260). Roxana goes to some lengths to spare her husband the “Blast of a just Providence” by separating her income from his estate, envisioning a providential storm enveloping all who touch her tainted effects. Yet she is quick to clarify that her actions stem not from a sincere repentance for her crimes, but “from another and lower kind of Repentance, and rather mov’d by my fears of Vengeance, than from a Sense of being spar’d from being punished, and landed safe after a Storm” (Roxana 261). She contrasts her fear of the storm with her inability to meaningfully repent in order to avoid her fate.

The last line of the book, rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, closes Roxana’s story on an ambiguous note. When Roxana’s long-lost daughter threatens to expose her, she vanishes under suspicious circumstances that point to Amy’s involvement. The punishment does not occur swiftly, but the narrative flattens the years to arrive at the conclusion Roxana paints as inevitable:

Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circumstances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also; the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime. (330)

The abrupt end to Roxana’s adventures deprives us of what we have been promised: a detailed account of the “Calamities” that Roxana tells us she deserves. Instead, Roxana closes with the “Blast of Heaven,” the storm she has long expected and the very torment that Defoe imagines countless characters experiencing from the beginning of his career. The providential storm, much like Roxana herself, ultimately escapes the narrative form of the novel.

In providing multiple interpretations of storms in many fictional works, Defoe’s novels parallel the point of collision between unpredictable meteors and a secularized eighteenth-century discourse of the weather. Defoe’s storms do not passively reflect this historical shift, but instead experiment with narrative form through an assemblage of perspectives. Setting out to trace the schism the Storm of 1703 opens up in interpretations of disaster, Defoe expresses interest in “where we find Nature defective in her Discovery, where we see Effects but cannot reach their Causes” (Storm 11). By the time Defoe pens Robinson Crusoe, an exploration of the “Causes” finds Crusoe trying on different readings of the storm, first as a “visible token” of his fate and then as the hollow revision in his “Journal.” In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe is able to entertain both naturalistic and providential interpretations by layering Crusoe’s retrospective thoughts over his initial impressions. Roxana, finally, features a protagonist committed to a naturalistic interpretation of storms who cannot shake her fear of providential retribution. The “Blast of Heaven,” her long-feared punishment, blots out all for the reader but the void after death that cannot be described.

University of California, Davis

THE EPONYMOUS HERO of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Colonel Jack, brother to Captain Jack and Major Jack, spends much of the book attempting to craft his identity through his relationships to others. Jack’s identity, and particularly the connection between his name and the Union Jack, attracted the attention of early scholars, but current research is most invested in Jack’s intersections with issues of race and colonialism. There are few studies which focus primarily on Colonel Jack, but the novel is increasingly recognized in major scholarly works, such as Dennis Todd’s Defoe’s America, which discuss the racist colonial system of North America during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Although usually discussed in the context of Defoe’s other narratives rather than on its own merits, Colonel Jack has much to recommend it to modern scholarship. With a hero that travels throughout the United Kingdom, France, and the Americas, and a plot which evokes parallels between American servitude and stories of Englishmen enslaved in Muslin North Africa, Colonel Jack is particularly interesting for its depiction of international connections and conflicts. Jack’s observations on the Irish, the Scots, the French, the Americans, and the Spanish settlers of South America offer a fascinating study of how perceptions of national and racial difference shape personal identification, the construction of class systems, and the social structures that accompanied the colonial system of coerced labour.

Focusing on Jack’s time in the British colonies and what his interactions reveal about British conceptions of servitude, slavery, and the system of indentured labour, this paper explores how Jack uses both identification and othering to create an identity. Life in the racially-divided colonies of Virginia—or perhaps Maryland, for, as Defoe claims “Maryland is Virginia, speaking of them at a distance” (195)—encourages Jack to utilize racial marks to establish his character, but he becomes quickly tangled in linguistic confusion as he discovers that racial identification fails to give him the status that he desires. Jack’s desire for recognition, status, and release from labour persistently leads him to conflate servants, slaves, and black individuals, who Defoe consistently describes as “negroes.” This verbal confusion troubles Jack’s attempt to distinguish labourers from “gentlemen” and to establish himself as above legal and social rules.

From the beginning of the novel, even before he is kidnapped and forced into service in Virginia, Jack lacks a familial identity or a stable sense of self, and the natal alienation of his forced labor leaves him, unlike the Barbary captives his story echoes, without even the promise of a home and family in England to distinguish himself from the people around him. He cannot define himself by his name, for Jack is given to him as a default rather than chosen as a mark of identity. He has no parentage, no inherited status, no money, and few prospects, but he clings to the idea that his parentage was genteel and his destiny special. Even as a child, Jack reports that he “told my nurse I would be called captain; for … I was a gentleman, and I would be a captain” and claimed precedence over his fellows (62). As evidence that he deserves this status, he offers the fact that the townsfolk among whom he grew up said he had “a pleasant, smiling countenance” and looked like “a gentleman’s son” (Defoe 65, 85). Clinging to this fragile bit of evidence for his destiny, Jack echoes Biblical language as he keeps the memory “laid up” in his “heart,” just as in the Bible Mary keeps evidence of her son Jesus’ heavenly father and special destiny “in her heart” (Defoe 65; Luke 2:19, 51). As he moves from freeman to indentured servant to owner, Jack retains his opening certainty that he is meant for better things and spends much of the novel defining himself in opposition to his legal and social equals. This opposition becomes especially troubling during his time as an indentured servant in Virginia.

Defoe marks Jack as a particularly intelligent and successful criminal. Jack claims that his intelligence and his gentlemanly aspirations give him a special right to gentility and separate him from the criminals that he claims deserve and benefit from forcible indenture and physical labour. This program is marked with contradiction from the first page of his narrative. Jack insists that “My original may be as high as any Bodies, for my Mother kept very good Company,” but he immediately confesses that he does not even know his mother’s name much less those of her companions (61). Worse, although his nurse tells him his name is “John,” she gives him no source for the name, and when she uses the same name for all three of the children under her care the reader is left to wonder whether the name came from her or from elsewhere (61). “John” immediately loses both his individuality and his name, declaring that “As we were all Johns, we were all Jacks” and the three boys become a conglomerate, distinguished by assumed titles but similar enough that our hero Jack finds himself dragged in front of a Justice for a crime committed by another of the Jacks (129).

Defoe highlights Jack’s further loss of identity in America in a footnote. In Virginia, he insists, Jack “was not call’d Col. Jack as at London, but Colonel, and they did not know me by any other name” (169). He has retained the honorific that he fought for, but lost his personal identity, and his first meeting with his “master” and benefactor forces him to confront and combat his lack of identity. Jack’s embarrassment is palpable as he attempt to define himself while knowing “little or nothing of myself, nor what my true Name is … [nor] which is my Christian-Name or which my Sir-Name, or whether I was ever Christen’d, or not” (169). Jack’s confusion over his name is immediately linked to confusion over his “self,” and the repetition of “Christian Name,” “Christian-Name” and “Christen’d” draws attention to Jack’s lack of standing in the Christian community also. While his master knows that “Christian” is both a religious marker and a descriptor that would identify him as part of a community, Jack’s decision to hyphenate “Christian-Name” denotes his ignorant belief that the word “Christian” is important only as it relates to the position of his name, as Defoe’s use of “Sir Name” silently reminds readers of Jack’s unfulfilled desire for a gentlemanly father and personal aspirations to gentility. Like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack follows Defoe’s preferred trajectory by showing its narrator raising himself from penniless subjection to a wealthy gentleman, ultimately rewarding Jack with his desired status. Along the way Defoe revisits the topics of indenture and slavery that he raised in those earlier novels. Like Robinson Crusoe, who has only one successful voyage, before he is captured by “a Turkish Rover” and “made [a] Slave” (61), Jack’s attempt to make an honest living for himself leads to his captivity and enforced labor. But Jack’s progression toward wealth and leisure also reveals the exceptional circumstances necessary for success. Reading Defoe’s transatlantic narratives next to both Barbary captivity narratives and reports of forcible indenture exposes important differences between individuals of different religions, nations, and social groups which Defoe’s narratives elide. By asserting the indistinguishability of persons, places, races, and nations in Colonel Jack, Defoe validates Jack’s entitlement and encourages the exploitation of others by validating Jack’s belief in the qualitative difference between labourers and gentlemen.

Although Jack is recognized for “gentlemanly” qualities from the beginning of his life, it is not until he is captured and taken to America as an indentured “slave” that he finagles the recognition he believes is his due. Here, surrounded by condemned criminals and “Negroes,” Jack uses his one exceptional quality, his “natural talent of talking,” to turn his luck in avoiding the law into loud proclamations of his innocence and unfitness for menial work. His narration also undergoes a more subtle slippage away from a language of commonality toward a language of exceptionalism.

This movement increasingly conflates his fellow indentured servants with “Negroes” as he lumps them both into the category of otherness. The story commonly slips from one category of laborer to another as Defoe begins by describing “the Place where the Servants were usually corrected,” and then adds, “there stood two Negroes” ready for correction (176). Defoe’s narration shows Jack attempting to support his right to both gentility and personhood by drawing a distinction between himself, as not only an Englishman, but an exceptionally intelligent and naturally gentile man, and the black people he describes as natural slaves. By doing so, the narrative promotes the hypocrisy of birth and class distinction which ultimately leads Jack to view both his fellow Europeans and the “Negros” he openly denigrates as natural slaves, confusing race, class, and identity in a hopelessly indistinguishable mass of exploitable people. Jack attempts to distinguish between categories, but in doing so he reveals that the primary category in which he is interested is not racial but social. While George Boulukos argues that Jack deploys a rhetoric of sympathy and similarity in this book, claiming that Defoe “creates the clearest distinction between Africans and Europeans,” I demonstrate how Jack’s rhetorical slippages between the terms “Servant,” “Slave,” and “Negro” echo contemporary views of indentured servitude and encourage identification between these categories even as Jack strives to keep them separated (625).

For Jack, like many of Defoe’s narrators, transportation to the colonies allows him to achieve the wealthy, privileged existence that he feels he deserves while simultaneously offering him a narrative which justifies his oppression and exploitation of others. In Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, Defoe, like many propagandists for the American colonies, claimed that America had exceptional opportunities for advancement beyond the laboring classes for ambitious, intelligent people who would otherwise be overlooked or succumb to a life of crime. Both Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders have often been read as propaganda for emigration, transportation, and the system of indentures, due to the manner in which both titular characters celebrate their forced transportation as a means of gaining money, wealth, status, and freedom (Novak 147, Richetti 82,Downie 83, Chaber 196, and McInelly 210-17). But as Paul Kahn argues of the idealistic image of American exceptionalism, this celebration “lies in the dimension of rhetoric, not logic” (198). Defoe directly benefited from transportation in his capacity as a merchant, and many of his works support England’s colonial venture in America (Backscheider 485-89). As Christopher Flynn argues, Defoe sees the lands that make up North America as peculiarly “bound to Britain,” and wrote both tracts and fictions to support economic and colonial ventures to the Americas (14). Jack Greene demonstrates Defoe’s participation in creating the image of the colonies “as lands of extraordinary opportunities for European immigrants and … as places with exceptional opportunities for individual betterment” (68). Paula Backscheider calls Defoe “a tireless proponent of colonization and the development of new markets and improved trade routes,” a form of exploitation which he saw as vital to both England and the Americas (Backscheider 439).

Defoe’s novels simultaneously praise the colonies as places where nobility is earned rather than inherited and reveal the illegal, immoral, and brutish underpinnings of colonial society. Scholars have consistently questioned the sincerity of Defoe’s narratives of repentance, suggesting that he sees crime as a legitimate money-making venture, but Defoe’s colonial novels may instead show a belief that crime and morality should be redefined within the colonies, or even within the context of merchant practice. Vincenzo Ruggiero has commented on the destruction of the “boundaries between … legitimate and illegitimate economic behaviour” toward other nations, concluding that English merchants displayed a tendency toward business crime (330). Jeremy Wear emphasizes the mercantile nature of crime by comparing the “predatory trade practices” and “ambiguous morality of legal commerce” of legitimate merchants in Defoe’s narratives with Defoe’s celebration of “piratical commerce as a normalizing, civilizing force” and “piratical trade as the ‘necessary violence’ of economic imperialism” (567-70, 596). Thus Defoe’s narratives, in which narrators lament their immoral practices while in Britain but eagerly embrace equally immoral acts in the colonies, falls within an existing tradition of removing colonial trade from the normal sphere of proper behaviour, the process of transportation offers both a way for his characters to redeem themselves and a form of justification.

If Defoe views the colonies as places where traditional laws do not apply, this may help to explain why the crimes that his narrators commit in England are removed, redeemed, or forgiven by means of the passage through and return to Britain. Srinivas Aravamudan and Matthew Mason highlight the importance of the return from America to England in both novels, and indeed Mason claims that Defoe followed the example of anti-colonialist literature of the period which insisted that “only a reverse emigration would complete the redemption” of a transported criminal and cement the exceptional status that Defoe claims is a central part of the colonial experience (Aravamudan 58, Mason 110). Joseph Bartolomeo similarly highlights Defoe’s narratives of coercion and the ways in which Defoe’s plot devices, narrative structure, and form often undercut the propaganda which he attempts to convey (457).

In Colonel Jack, Defoe’s praise of transportation is undercut by Jack’s forcible and illegal (though justly deserved) transportation and indenture and further undercut by Jack’s refusal to free and support his own servants. Despite Jack’s repeated insistence that “if their own Diligence in the time of Service gains them but a good Character … there is not the poorest and most despicable Felon that ever went over but may, after his time is served, begin for himself, and may in time be sure of raising a good Plantation,” Jack refuses to reward diligence with freedom (195-6). His wife is the only servant he frees, and that only to after she demonstrates her obedience and submission and declares “that she would not look any higher than to be [his] Servant, as long as she liv’d” (294). Even his “clever” felon, who teaches him to read, gains his respect, and acquires the position of overseer, which was Jack’s own springboard to freedom, gains his freedom rather in spite of Jack than because of him.

Although Jack claims to have “deliver’d my tutor from his Bondage,” he also declares that he could not give “him his Liberty … till his time was expired, according to the Certificate of his Transportation, which was Register’d; so I made him one of my Overseers” (215). This may have improved the man’s standard of living, but even Jack acknowledges the insufficiency of the gesture, which “was only a present Ease and Deliverance to him from the hard Labour and Fare which he endured as a Servant” (216). When Jack offers his tutor the position of overseer, he mimics the special treatment he had received from his own master, but he does not offer his overseer the monetary help, gift of servants, or loans that he himself received. Nor does what Jack gives his tutor equal his definition of personal liberty, which he defines as “going out of … Service” and gaining his own home and lands (192).

The “bondage” that Jack delivers his servant out of is only that of hard labour, and he leaves the man in the “miserable Condition of a Slave sold for Money” for twenty years while he travels back to the UK to settle (206). His tutor, no fool, takes this opportunity to acquire a plantation of his own, so that Jack finds him “in Circumstances very differing from what I left him in” when he returns. The tutor has taken advantage of “the Countries Allowance of Land,” gaining the prosperity Defoe’s novels promise to hardworking felons in the New World, but Jack’s refusal to participate in the system of generosity from which he benefited problematizes his narrative of beneficial transportation and undercuts his claim, repeated throughout the novel, that he identifies with both indentured servants and slaves (216, 288).

As Boulukos demonstrates, Jack’s reluctance to act on his purported sympathy and his willingness to exploit those who he describes as his fellow servants show that “Jack is not much interested in the implications of slaves’ humanity” and his emotional response ends when it threatens to cut into his profits (634). Jack’s refusal to consider freeing either his servants or his slaves reinforces his self portrayal as exceptional, as does the fact that only the servant who he admits is both better educated and in a stronger moral position than Jack himself is able to follow Jack’s example in gaining freedom. The inability of Jack’s other indentured servants to attain freedom, however, complicates the distinction Boulukos claims to see between black and white, temporary and permanent, and innate and external forms of subjugation in the novel. Counter to both Boulukos’ distinction and Defoe’s own claims, Jack’s progression to wealth and status is not typical of hardworking white servants in the colonies, but is rather dependant on the unusual recognition and help that Jack receives and on his success in presenting himself as extraordinarily deserving.

Jack recognizes that the differences between slave, servant, and free man are external and not internal when he uses a change of clothing to signify his transition from plantation worker to overseer. When offered the opportunity to improve his status he hesitates because he is “in the ordinary habit of a poor half-naked slave,” declaring that he is not dressed for the office. In response, he is offered clothing and told to “go in there a Slave, and come out a Gentleman” (173). Even in Jack’s first encounter with the threat of slavery, when he insists that he and his fellow deserters “were not people to be sold for slaves,” he implicitly recognizes that his status as a free man does not depend on any innate or internal quality. Instead, he bases his claim to be above enslavement on his moneyed status as a man “of substance,” a status whose artificiality is underscored by the fact that Jack’s money comes from repeated theft. Although William McBurney argues that Jack is intended to be an innocent hero and an “honest thief,” Jack’s initial crimes, in the legal and economic framework which this book supports and which Jack several times praises, deserve exactly the “enslavement” that Jack is trying to escape (324). The status which Jack claims is not based on any sense of innocence, but in a view of himself as above the rules that govern others, a viewpoint which is revealed and rewarded when Jack embraces the system of transportation and indenture.

Even as Jack’s job as an overseer clearly separates him from the “slaves and servants” under him, he insists on calling himself a servant until his master and patron dies. This allows him to claim a sympathy with the indentured servants and slaves that, while it discourages him from physical brutality, opens them up to more problematic forms of manipulation. Boulukos has written extensively on the problematic nature of Jack’s so-called “kindness” to his workers, resting as it does upon the continued threat of brutality within the plantation and the idea that slaves should be “obliged” by a “sense of kind Usage” when put to forced labour without the addition of continual whippings (203). But Jack’s combination of sympathetic identification and sharp distinction between laboring and gentlemanly classes also portrays perpetual servitude as a form of external control necessary for both his black and white “fellow-servants.”

Jack’s treatment of his tutor exemplifies the hypocrisy of the colonial system and exposes the falsehood of Jack’s claimed superiority. Jack’s tutor is as hard a worker as Jack, as capable of managing as an overseer, better educated, and equally culpable of theft. But while Jack displays what John O’Brien calls an “almost phobic relation to labor” which is part of his claim to exceptional gentlemanly status (74), when speaking of his tutor, Jack describes ill-treatment and hard labour as necessary for both master and servant. He claims to be “obliged to put [his tutor] to” hard labour, refusing to admit that he has a choice – despite his later treatment of his wife, who he gives a servant of her own to free her from all necessity of physical work. Jack avoids physical labor in every possible case. His greatest complaint against indentured servitude is the labour he must undergo on the plantations, and O’Brian argues that part of his objection to whipping his former fellows is that “the labor of carrying out corporal punishment” involves physical effort (75). In comparison, Defoe makes Jack’s tutor praise “the Life of a Slave in Virginia” because he is “deliver’d from the horrid Necessity of doing such ill things … but am fed, though I am made to earn it by the hard Labour of my Hands” (205). Similarly, the lecture Jack’s master gives a young thief in a similar position describes transportation as a grant of new life where servitude offers no opportunity for crime. The tutor’s willing submission to his position, and Jack’s acceptance of his own mastery over someone he acknowledges echoes “my own Case, and the Condition of the former part of my Life,” demonstrate the problematic basis of Jack’s exceptionalism and its troubling consequence (210).

Boulukos suggests that Jack displays an initial “failure to distinguish between black and white plantation workers” but that he will later “set about making a distinction in no uncertain terms” (616). While Jack does attempt to separate and categorize different forms of black and white laborers, however, he never fully separates indentured servants from slaves. Jack does learn, after he leaves England, to separate free servants from servants working under indenture, but his confusion between racial categories and between slavery and indentured servitude continues throughout the novel.

By the end of the novel, Jack is a confident and self-assured owner of both slaves and indentured servants. He seems very different from the Jack who described an old nurse-maid as a “poor creature [who] worked and was a slave” (174). Once he reaches the Americas, where racial difference creates a visual distinction between free and unfree, and where Jack is a direct participant in the institution of slavery, Jack begins to distinguish between free and unfree servants, but he continues to confuse indentured servitude with slavery throughout the text. In the long and infamous passages in the novel in which he describes “negroes” as inferior to Europeans, Jack portrays Africans as unable to distinguish between cruelty and punishment and easily persuaded into a sense of gratitude to their owners. He also insists on their “brutality and obstinate temper,” (173). But this emphasis on racial difference actually highlights Jack’s confusion over the identity of his fellow servants and slaves.

His first declaration of his new status as an indentured servant, declaring that he and his “Fellow Deserter” were “now Fellow Servants” is immediately followed by a statement that they were “put in among about 50 Servants, as well Negroes as others.” This description elides the distinctions he has just drawn, creating a single category that encompasses servant and slave, black and white, a category which Jack fails to distinguish even after he is himself freed (165). When Jack describes his duties as an overseer and a participant in subjugation, he also demonstrates confusion between different forms of subjugated identity. Part of his job is

to see the Servants and Negroes did their work … and the Horse-whip was given me to correct and lash the Slaves and Servants … This part turned the very blood within my Veins, and I could not think of it with any temper, that I, who was but Yesterday a Servant or Slave like them, and under the Authority of the same Lash, should lift up my Hand to the Cruel Work which was my Terror but the Day before. This, I say, I could not do; insomuch that the Negroes perceived it, and I had soon so much Contempt upon my Authority that we were all in Disorder. (195)

In this passage, Defoe repeatedly distinguishes servile states, separating “Servants and Negroes,” and “Slaves and Servants,” but while the separation between categories creates distinctions between different classes, the redefining of categories in this passage encourages confusion between them. By first defining “Negroes” as separate from servants and then redefining the group as composed of “slaves” and servants, Defoe seems to equate “Negroes” with slaves as a separate category from the white servants. But Jack’s new position as an overseer gives him equal authority over both groups. He has the right to “correct and lash” both slaves and servants, and to force both to work against their will, and the single category of servile figures performing “their work” demonstrates an equality between the two groups who are combined under a single pronoun.

Deepening the confusion between categories, Jack then rejects any instinctive conflation of slavery with blackness by referring to himself as “a Servant or Slave like them,” again reducing both servant and slave, black and white, to a single conglomerate. Immediately, Defoe reiterates the importance of racial distinction, declaring that when Jack hesitated to beat members of the servant-slave conglomerate, “the Negroes perceived it.” Emphasizing the contempt of the black slaves for a master who refuses to inflict pain seems to reinforce Defoe’s claims that black slaves are particularly “barbarous” and “must be ruled with a rod of iron.” (173) Before readers reach the end of the sentence, however, confusion creeps in again as Jack declares that “we were all in disorder,” directing the reader’s gaze back to the peculiarly passive stative that “I had soon so much Contempt upon my Authority that we were all in Disorder.” By switching to passive voice, Jack elides the universality of the contemptuous reaction to his leniency, but the telling word “all” demonstrates the racial confusion of a world where the perception of “the Negroes” leads to rebellion among people of all races. By the end of the passage, the terms “servant” and “slave” have both disappeared and although he is clearly speaking of the integrity of the entire plantation when he declares that “we were all in disorder,” the only category remaining to which readers can ascribe the “Contempt upon my Authority” that he faces is that of the “negro,” thus collapsing “all” of the servants on the plantation under the category of the lowest and most exploited figure.

This movement is repeated cyclically throughout the book. Jack moves from an initial description of the plantation’s “abundance of Servants, as well Negroes as English” in which he conflates the two categories under the heading of “Servants” to a separation of these categories in his declaration that his newly gentlemanly duty is “to look after the Servants and Negroes” and then back to conflation as he admits that he has been “too gentle with the Negroes, as well as with other Servants” (165, 173, 178). This final conflation leads to Jack’s most famous statement of sympathy as he declares it “was impossible for me to … use this Terrible Weapon [the horsewhip] on the naked Flesh of my Fellow Servants, as well as Fellow Creatures,” a declaration that undoes all of his careful separation of “English” from “Negroe” as Jack recognizes his fellowship with both as part of the single category of “Servant” (179).

By splitting his identification into two categories and identifying himself as a “Fellow Servant” and a “Fellow Creature,” Jack might intend to continue the division between black and white servants that the narrative displays elsewhere, but this possibility raises the troubling question of which category describes which group. If Jack’s intent is to classify the European servants as “Fellow Servants” and the black slaves as “Fellow Creatures,” then he must be classing himself as a “Creature” with them. Conversely, if Jack intends to define the Europeans as his “Fellow Creatures,” foregrounding his physical identification with other white men, this only enhances the servant-slave confusion which the narrative displays.

Jack’s use of the word “Creature” furthers the novel’s ambivalence about identity. “Creature” has many potential valences in the eighteenth century, some practical, some religious, and some social. The word may suggest a less-than-human status, especially as this portion of the narrative occurs before Jack is instructed in the Christian religion and can be expected to know the religious meaning of the word. If we follow the religious meaning, however, “Creature” attains an equalizing force, referring to the Christian belief that all things and peoples are created by the same God. Complicating this still further are the generic use of the term “creature” during the eighteenth century to mean both a person and that person’s status and Jack’s habit, throughout the novel, of using “creature” to refer to people of lower status, as he does when describing the nurse-maid as both a “poor creature” and “a slave” (174).

Each of these definitions involves an identification with a group that, in much of novel, Jack attempts to separate himself from. None of them allow Jack to maintain the distinction between himself and both the black and white “Servants” that he desires. The terminological ambiguity of this segment enhances Jack’s confusion between the categories of whiteness, blackness, servitude, and slavery. The one clear thing that emerges from this confusion is that Jack’s claim to sympathy and identification does not extend to raising his “Fellow Creatures” to be his equals. He may not wish to use the whip, but he would rather enforce discipline than lose his command.

The slippage between blackness and slavery that Jack displays in this book is common to late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century writers. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn claimed that the words “Negro and Slave” were “by Custom grown Homogenous and Convertible,” and Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary in fact defines a “negroe” as a slave and vice versa, in a move that Janet Sorensen interprets as “dismissing the possibility that a white Briton could ever occupy the same position” (Godwyn 36, Sorensen, 116). In his recent book Slaves and Englishmen Michael Guasco suggests that the fictional identification of enslaved Indians as “cannibal negros” was intended to place them within a category of enslavable persons (187). While the ideas of blackness and servile status were often conflated, however, direct identification of blackness with slavery was not common until the mid eighteenth century, when, as Roxann Wheeler demonstrates, the adage “I’ll be no man’s negroe” began to be used by English servants to complain against a form of ill-usage they associated with slavery (172). By associating blackness, with a form of exacerbated servitude, these servants were engaging with a widespread discussion of slavery in the New World based around a conflation between indentured servitude—status most commonly inflicted upon white or Indian subjects—and slavery.

Conflation between indentured servitude and slavery was also common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the difference in terminology was further confused by the common practice of using slavery metaphorically to reflect hard labour and bad working conditions. In a time when the Earl of Wilmington could complain that his work as Treasurer to the Prince of Wales was so unrewarding that “If there be a Slave in England, I am the Man,” it must be a difficult task to unravel literal and metaphorical forms of slavery (Spencer Compton Papers). Indentures and apprenticeships, which made people into saleable commodities for a specified length of time, further muddied the distinction between service, servitude, and slavery.

Defoe’s works show several examples of this confusion, as recent examinations of Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Captain Singleton have demonstrated (Swaminathan 57-74). As Dennis Todd argues, both Moll’s first and second trips to America revolve around indentured servitude. Although Moll initially arrives in Virginia as a wealthy wife, “the episode … says next to nothing about the typical life of a free immigrant, chronicling instead Moll’s mother’s career as an indentured servant” and highlighting the opportunities which indentures offered (8). Despite Defoe’s focus on the positive side of indentured servitude in Moll Flanders, this narrative, written in the same year as Colonel Jack, shows evidence of the same slippage between servitude and slavery that plagues Jack. Moll’s mother, in describing the “inhabitants of the colony” insists that “such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants” are “more properly call’d slaves” because the planters “buy them” and force them into labour (112-3). Although Moll, heartened by her mother’s eventual prosperity, submits a “petition for transportation,” declaring that she would “choose any thing rather than death,” her husband insists that “he could much easier submit to be hang’d” than to “being sent over to the plantations as Romans sent condemn’d slaves to work” (232, 233, 299).

When speaking to her husband, Moll resists the conflation of indentures and slavery that Jack continually makes. Instead of identifying herself by creating connections with other indentured servants and even slaves, as Jack does, Moll insists that transportation will not change her identity. She sees transportation as a temporary status that offers the reunited couple a chance for life, wealth, and freedom, but Defoe’s ambivalence about indentures appears only a few pages later, when Moll is actually on her way to America. Although Moll insists that it is only her husband who is “very much dejected and cast down” by their circumstances, she describes their condition as “the despicable quality of transported convicts destin’d to be sold for slaves”(307). She immediately turns to reckoning the money with which she and her husband can buy themselves free and obtain their “certificate of discharge” on arrival (307, 315). Todd sees Defoe’s presentation of transportation as “both mercy and punishment,” but Defoe’s explicit presentation of it seems to more nearly straddle the line between freedom and slavery (Todd 11).

This confusion was a common complaint among would-be promoters of the colonial system. In his Present State of Virginia, Hugh Jones complains that Englishmen “are under such dreadful apprehensions of the imaginary slavery of the plantations” that they refuse to go there to work (131-2). Similarly George Alsop, in his Character of Maryland, declares that the “vulgar in England” see indentured servitude as “slaves” and in his Virginia Impartially Examined, William Bullock also attributes to “the ordinarie sort of people” a belief that “all those servants who are sent to Virginia, are sold as slaves” (Alsop 99, Bullock 13). Modern scholarship agrees with these contemporary reports, and Mason claims that the “line between colonial servitude and slavery” was “a fine distinction that a suspicious public was not disposed to make” (116). Parliament joined the general confusion about the status of indentured servants, describing kidnapped victims as “Cryinge and Mourninge for Redemption from their Slavery” (I.296-7). This terminological confusion had real effects, as revealed by Abbot Smith, who establishes the tendency of English newspapers to refer to victims of the “spirits” who kidnapped young men into colonial indentures as “slaves,” and records the complaints of more scrupulous colonial recruiters that this “ill practice” was hindering emigration (70-2; 61).

Slippage between the languages of imprisonment, servitude, and slavery, which is visible in newspapers and novels throughout the period and which discouraged many would-be colonists, may have been caused in part by the widespread practice of religiously motivated slavery in the form of corsair slaving. Muslim corsair slaving, which was an important feature of European coastal and marine life from the early 1500s into the twentieth century, played a prominent part in shaping European ideas of enslavement and redemption. Studies in the mutual enslavement of Muslims and Christians reveal an upswing in Muslim corsair slaving during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while slavery decreased throughout most of Europe (Gordon 107-9, Bono 191-201, Davis, 9, 28). As European slavery redefined itself, it used narratives of Muslim slavery to shape images of slavery and indenture.

Muslim slaving, of which Robinson Crusoe’s brief experience is a typical example, involved both piracy and inland raids, which were very similar to the trade in kidnapped and forcibly indentured servants (Davis 8). Viewing Jack’s capture and forcible indenture in light of narratives of Muslim captivity helps to explain the violence of Jack’s belated and futile attempt at self-defence when he realizes he has been captured. Daniel Viktus believes that inflated numbers of enemies killed in self-defence offered captives an opportunity to assert their identity against their foreign captors, but the narrative of “Mr. T. S.,” which insists that it would be “an unworthy Act to deliver our selves into the Enemies hands without a stroke” suggests that acts of violence might help kidnapped and enslaved men to avert a form of victim-blaming to which these slaves were uniquely vulnerable (Vitkus 195, T. S. 8-9).

Captives like Thomas Phelps, whose 1685 captivity narrative reveals that he and his men were tricked into submission, nevertheless insist that they “did intend to fight” (2). Defoe’s Colonel Jack places similar emphasis on Jack’s martial courage, insisting that, even though he was tricked onto the slaver’s boat, he was not disarmed “without giving, and receiving some Wounds” (159). Through violence, these captives take the initial step to defining themselves in opposition to their captors. They also create narratives of individual exceptionalism to explain and justify their success in attaining their freedom and their willingness to abandon their fellow captives to continued slavery.

Defoe uses the strategies of Barbary captivity narratives to describe the kidnappings of Jack and Robinson Crusoe, foregrounding their martial prowess in order to justify their special status and excuse their abuse or desertion of their fellows. Untrained in seafaring and unused to hard labour, it is unlikely that Crusoe was more than a hindrance to the sailors who defended their vessel. But he takes his share in the credit, using third person plural to describe his ship’s struggle against the Turkish vessel (61). He emphasizes the inequality of the fight, declaring that ship had only “12 Guns, and the Rogue 18” and insisting that there were “near 200 Men” on the Turkish ship while the loss of only 11 fighters, “three of our Men kill’d, and eight wounded,” left Crusoe’s own ship unable to fight (61).

Crusoe separates himself from his fellows, as was typical in a narrative of Muslim captivity, declaring he was not “carried up the Country to the Emperor’s Court, as the rest of our Men were, but was kept by the Captain of the Rover, as his proper prize” because he was especially “fit for his Business” (61). Crusoe emphasizes his special position and skills, insisting that the Captain “never went without me” (62-3). Although he brags of his position, Crusoe asserts his natural “Liberty” (62). He admits that “The Usage I had there was not so dreadful as at first I apprehended,” but insists that “I meditated nothing but my Escape,” and while he covers his capture in only a paragraph, his description of his ingenuity in escaping the Moors, overawing the “friendly Negroes” on the coast, and turning his forcible capture and enslavement to such profit that he lands on the shore of All-Saints Bay in Brazil with “about 220 Pieces of Eight” takes up several pages (61, 63, 72, 74). By emphasising his personal courage and intelligence at the expense of the communal, the novel glosses over the fate of Crusoe’s fellow captives, exaggerates his own importance, and establishes his right to escape to freedom.

Crusoe’s narrative of forcible capture, pugnacious prowess, and physical separation from his fellows echoes Jack’s story of captivity. While Crusoe emphasizes his youth and physical qualities, Jack insists that it was his gentility and manners which caused the captain of his ship to treat him differently than his foster-brother, “Captain Jack” and which led him to be separated from his fellow captives. But in both cases, the physical separation causes a complete mental separation as each captive appears to forget about their fellow prisoners, and even the servants or slaves with whom they are then placed, in order to focus on attaining individual freedom and prosperity.

The struggle to justify a self-centred desire for individual freedom by claiming a special status played an important part in many Barbary captivity narratives and, like the struggle to maintain individual and national identities, plays a part in rejecting the “natal alienation” and “social death” that Orlando Patterson sees as the defining qualities of slavery (5-6). Joseph Morgan emphasizes both national and religious identities when he compares the “Captive Christians” in the hands of the Muslims to the “Turks and Moors” who suffer the same fate under Christian masters, claiming that “our American Planters … are passable good Algerines” in their cruelty (516-7). Thomas Baker, the British consul in Tripoli during the 1680s, defined the periodic, small-scale raids by Muslim corsairs on coastal villages as “Christian stealing” and described the corsairs as setting out “to Fish for Dutchmen” (120, 124). These contemporary descriptions of nationally and religiously-motivated slavery help to provide a context for Jack’s constant definition of himself and his fellow white servants by their nationality.

Although forcibly indentured servants were brought to the Americas from many countries, and his descriptions of some of his fellow Jacobites make it clear that his “English” servants certainly included “Scotchsmen” and possibly other nationalities also, Jack defines his fellow servants as Englishmen (162). This identification is part of a purposeful creation of identity which Defoe continues in the Atlas Maritimus, written near the end of his life.¹ In this book, Defoe ignores both indigenous nations and the presence of other nationalities to claim that “all the Inhabitants are [the king of England’s] Subjects, or the Slaves of his Subjects, none excepted” in a move that conflates slaves and servants, denies the interests of other nations, and cements British authority over North America (325). Defoe’s intentionality here is evident in the fact that only a few hundred pages earlier he had asserted England’s need to expel French settlers in order to establish an ordered civilization, but also in the form of his wider colonial project (282). As Daniel Statt argues, Defoe “was a supporter of schemes to encourage foreigners to settle” in England and in the Americas (295). But while Defoe’s English narrators retain their Englishness throughout the process of colonization, he portrays men from other nations giving up their original identities through the process of emigration, losing their exceptional qualities, and becoming part of the mass of exploitable British subjects.

Following Defoe’s project of rewriting the identities of his subservient subjects, Jack’s attempt to differentiate black from white servants based on their religion is even less successful than his ability to recognize different nationalities, and he only once attempts to compare “the Negroes” to “Christian Servants” (193). Perhaps Defoe is aware of the conscious attempts to deny slaves religious instruction which were prevalent at the time. Denying slaves religious education was decried by both abolitionist reformers and slave-owning preachers. William Fleetwood was one of many popular preachers who denied what he considered to be a pervasive belief that “were their Slaves Christians, they would immediately, upon their Baptism, become free,” insisting that it was perfectly acceptable to enslave Christians, a point of view which Defoe may have heard from his contemporaries (18-20). Perhaps he is only conscious of the irony involved in calling a man like Jack Christian when Jack admits that he had never “had any serious Religious reflections” and who in fact has to be persuaded “to be a Christian” by one of his own servants later in the novel (200, 212). While other writers and novelists set up more or less successful divisions by nationality or religion, Defoe remains bound to a continually slipping division between “Slave,” Servant,” and “Negroe.”

Rarely, despite the general confusion during this time over how to define enslavement, does this slippage include racial cross-identification. Instead, authors insisted on their racial and national distinctions as important facets of their identity. Indeed, Mason shows that for many of the “enslaved” white men the ultimate indignity was their enforced identification with black slaves, and some of the indentured servants whose writings Mason examines “clearly deemed working alongside slaves as much a disgrace as being sold and examined like an animal” (114, 116-7). For men like these, while they might call their situation “slavery,” there is no confusion of identity between themselves and the black slaves they worked with. In Colonel Jack, contrarily, we see continual slippage between categories to the extent that even Defoe’s usual careful accounting suffers from an inability to consistently distinguish between “servant,” “slave,” and “Negroe.”

When Jack’s “master” frees him from his indentures, he gives him not only a plantation but also slaves to work it. Jack accepts “my grateful negro, Mouchat,” as well as “two Servants more, a Man and a Woman,” whose price his former master “put to my Account” (197). These two servants are not explicitly assigned a race when they first appear, but Defoe’s prose later reveals that they are white as, several paragraphs later, he declares that “I got three Servants more, and one Negroe, so that I had five white Servants and two Negroes” (198). Several pages later, after a digression on education in which Jack re-emphasizes his deliverance “from Slavery and the wretched State of a Virginia Sold Servant,” he declares that “a clever Fellow that came over a transported Felon … fell into my Hands for a Servant” at what Jack calls “the Rate of a Slave” (199, 201-2).

Now we readers who have paid attention are aware that at this point Jack owns six white “Servants” and two black slaves. But in the following paragraph, Jack announced that he has “now five Servants” (202). By the end of the year, he has “purchased two Negroes more, so that now,” he claims, “I had seven Servants” (202). Now, this number is clearly incorrect. If we go back through Jack’s purchases, we will see that he currently has six white servants; Mouchat, a black man who is definitely categorized as a slave rather than a servant; and three unnamed “Negroes” who may be either “Slaves” or “Servants” but at least two of which he appears to have classified as servants. Even if Jack has decided, for whatever reason, not to categorize his intelligent felon as a servant, despite his use of him as both tutor and overseer, his numbers register a fundamental uncertainty about how to differentiate status relative to race, slavery, and servitude. Jack’s ownership of these ten human beings is not in question. He has explicitly spent money to purchase each of them, whether slave or servant, and he has the right to command all of them. But Jack’s uncertainty over how many servants he owns, their race, and whether he has the right to include his tutor in their number, forces readers to confront the troubling liminality created by Defoe’s narrative of personal success.

Defoe’s willingness to exempt some characters from the punishments he allots to others and his positive attitude toward theft and piracy when it is directed toward suitable targets, such as Jack’s illegal “trading” endeavors with Spanish South America at the end of Captain Jack, elides the strict boundaries between planters and felons that Jack attempts to define. The relationship between Jack’s tutor, as a condemned and repentant thief who is therefore a willing collaborator in his own subordination and Jack, as an unrepentant but uncaptured thief, demonstrates Jack’s willingness to redraw boundaries between servant, slave, and free when it suits his own interest. Jack’s insistence that “I did not come over to Virginia in the Capacity of a Criminal,” by which he justifies his behaviour to others and manipulates them into agreeing to serve him highlights the hypocrisy of the “reformed” felons and planters that Defoe’s novel celebrates even as the novel appears to accept Jack’s justification (210).

Defoe’s combination of exceptionalism, sympathy, and confused identification in Colonel Jack may conflate coerced workers, both white indentured servants and black slaves, in such a way that readers can easily view them as equals, but it does so only to insist that both blacks and whites are acceptable candidates for exploitation. By sanctioning the desire of the planter to separate himself from the men and women who work on the plantation, Defoe encourages the illusion that “if they can deserve it” the “people who are either transported or otherwise trepanned into those places” will earn their own freedom without the need for intervention from the “kind masters” that Jack praises (195). This then supports the opposing belief that those servants and slaves who are indeed “rendered miserable and undone” are the “sullen, stupid Fellow[s]” who Jack claims are “unavoidable” and unfit for the exceptional—that is, decent—treatment he claims for himself (195, 203).

The research for this paper was partially supported by a generous Clark Library Postdoctoral Fellowship. I want to thank my colleagues at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the University of California, Los Angeles for their help and support during the research process. Any errors that remain are my own.

WHAT PAINS has Scotland taken to be poor!” Daniel Defoe proclaims in Caledonia, his poem and pro-Union propaganda piece of 1706 (17). The poem offers the landed gentry of Scotland an analysis of the causes of the country’s poverty and prescriptions to improve its economic fortunes. Although he presents his recommendations as an observer and admirer of Scotland, the poem is part of Defoe’s body of political work, written while he was employed by Robert Harley to sway English and Scottish opinion in favor of the Union. Maximilian Novak observes that although Defoe presents himself during this period as a journalist, “his specialty was a powerful rhetoric in prose and poetry” (Daniel Defoe 26). Given that the subject of the poem is how Scotland can alleviate its poverty through political union with England, despite Defoe’s claims to the contrary, it is important to ask what kind of economic rhetoric Defoe employs to persuade his audience to vote for the Union.

Caledonia has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives: as an expression of Defoe’s realism in depicting Scotland as it actually is (Novak, Transforivmations fn 32, 195), an application of scientific reason to Scotland’s issues (Novak, “Daniel Defoe,” 52-56), a set of political arguments to show that Scotland and England have similar values (Peraldo, pars. 9-14 and 30-31), and as an example of contemporary topographical poetry (Backscheider, Daniel Defoe 38-39), among others. Novak says that Defoe sees his own work as a “literary recreation” of the real world, and that is true in Caledonia insofar as the poem offers observations of Scotland’s resources and condition (Transformations 192). However, what informs Defoe’s view and the way in which he observes those resources is another matter. While Paula Backscheider is correct that Defoe is a practical author who writes economic geographies, I argue that there is a particular worldview that influences what is included in his geography (“Defoe” 7, 19). Given that Defoe’s purpose in composing the poem is to provide an economic argument to convince the gentry to vote for the Union, what is missing from the extant literature, especially from the perspective of the history of economic thought, is a discussion of the economic rhetoric of Caledonia.

Mercantilism was the dominant body of thought in contemporary English economic theory and policy. One of its well-known tenets was the promotion of maintaining a positive balance of trade and granting monopolies to trading companies to accomplish the task of commercial dominance and expansion. While I agree with Srinivas Aravamudan that Defoe is not a strict advocate of monopoly companies, such companies are only one aspect of mercantilist ideology. Defoe’s poem, I argue, is steeped in a mercantilist worldview and methodology in its analysis of and solutions to Scotland’s economic issues. My focus in this article is thus not solely on Defoe’s observations on Scotland’s trade, but also on the underlying mercantilist methods of inventorying of resources and the rhetoric of power present in his examination of Scotland’s resources and his suggestions for aggressive improvement. The mercantilist rhetoric of power justifies the use of violent force to attain national ends, whether these are the extraction of resources, seizure of territory, or commercial and military war.¹ These aspects are starkly present throughout the poem.

Laurence Dickey says that in Defoe’s theory of power “a nation’s ‘strength’ lay more in its commercial wealth than in the martial valour of its people” (64, 77-82). I argue that Defoe believes that power is to be found in both, as both are needed to build an empire, but which one a nation focuses on depends on the strength of that country relative to another. National power in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century mercantilist thought is synonymous with any activity that strengthens the nation, whether that be an increase in production, an attainment of bullion, or seizing overseas territories, as Salim Rashid (139-141) and Lars Magnusson (Political Economy, 37-39 and 94-111) have demonstrated. Therefore although Defoe focuses on improvement rather than balances of trade, the way in which he assesses the country’s situation and the language he uses for its improvement reveal deep mercantilist roots. Additionally, in arguing that Scotland should focus its strength initially on internal economic development rather than external trade and national defense, Defoe promotes actions that strongly benefit England’s own mercantilist goals. By encouraging the gentry to look inwards, Scotland is removed as a potential commercial and military threat if the Union does not pass, and, if it does pass, any increase in Scotland’s wealth becomes a boon to England’s economic power in a united state.

Defoe and Economics

Defoe’s economic rhetoric is a relatively understudied aspect of his writing, even amongst economists. Historians of economic thought within economics have recently turned more attention on Defoe’s fiction. However, most of the economics literature treating Defoe focuses on the contributions, both real and imagined, of Robinson Crusoe’s titular self-sufficient hero to the construction of the self-sufficient “economic man” of modern orthodox economic theory, as Grappard, Hewitson, and Watson have noted. While economists have recently begun to turn to Defoe’s insights on trade and globalization, as in Hayashi and Goodwin, the discipline has so far neglected the economic arguments in Defoe’s nonfiction. In particular, scholars in the history of economic thought have yet to study Defoe’s political pamphlets in the context of seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century English mercantilist theory.

Mercantilism itself has been explored in depth in the history of economic thought. Although often conflated with the pursuit of specie, due to subsequent economists’ exclusive focus on this aspect of Adam Smith’s more detailed discussion of mercantilist activity in the Wealth of Nations, modern treatments see mercantilism differently.² Most historians of economic thought now define mercantilism as a set of theories and policies that sought to maximize state power and expansion of territory, originating from the state-building of the seventeenth century and extending into the empire-building of the eighteenth (Hutchison; Magnusson, Mercantilism 94-111; Backhouse, 66-88; Hont, 51-65 and 186-266). Individual policies differed by nation depending on circumstance and time, but as Joseph Schumpeter notes, “There was no lack of unity about them as to political vision. And this vision was quite comprehensive, embracing all the economic problems of the nation” (197).

The mercantilist economic goals common to each nation-state in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were to strengthen, display, and if necessary deploy the power of the state through military action. All economic activity under a mercantilist policy umbrella was geared towards promoting state power, whether the state chose to use that power or not. In the history of economic thought literature, Eli Hecksher (1935) has shown that mercantilism was a means of increasing state power; Lars Magnusson has further developed this view, seeing mercantilist policy as a means of accumulating and extending state power through both commercial and military means, which often work in tandem (Political Economy; Mercantilism). Maintaining a positive balance of trade, having a large and industrious working population, and producing manufactured goods for export at competitive prices were hallmarks of mercantilist policy, but not the telos of the mercantilist philosophy. The focus on trade balances and accumulation of bullion that Smith identified as defining traits of mercantilism were simply a means to achieve the ends identified by Hecksher and Magnusson.³

A basic assumption of the mercantilist writers of the seventeenth century, such as William Petty, Thomas Mun, and Charles Davenant, was that the amount of resources available in the world, and therefore the wealth of the world, is fixed. Thus an important goal for any one nation-state is to attain more resources and to discover ways to use their resources more efficiently in order to produce and export more than competing nation-states. The resulting influx of bullion from exports is a sign of a nation’s power and a means to deploy its power commercially and militarily. Productive power depended on more access to resources and thus territorial expansion is key to commercial growth; military power aided in both of these pursuits.⁴

As Aravamudan outlines using examples from both fiction and nonfiction, Defoe’s writing displays a consistency of thought with the majority of basic mercantilist beliefs. Although not a strict bullionist, Defoe likens the imbalance of trade with Asia to Europe lying with its veins cut open and bleeding to death, consistently stresses the need for trade to gain resources, repeatedly represents merchants as experts, and emphasizes that international trade is the best means to bring about economic growth (47-50). Colonization, a mercantilist necessity, also plays a prominent role in Defoe’s fiction in the form of “adventuring.” Such expansion of territory comes with a show of force as these novels of voyaging also contain “Extreme, often unmotivated violence” and the display of “primitive accumulation alongside the massacre of those deemed savage” (47).

Although he may not have been thinking about economic theory systematically, Defoe’s suggestions for economic improvement are strongly informed by such mercantilist economic thought. Caledonia is an expression of a particular view of resources and economic power and the uses to which they are ultimately to be put. I wish to situate Defoe’s poem within a strain of mercantilist thought that promoted English expressions of state power through shows of force, manifested in the building and exertion of military and commercial power. Seen through this lens, the poem demonstrates Defoe’s understanding of mercantilist ideas of power, and argues that the ultimate economic goal of the Union is to direct Scotland’s economic improvement into particular channels that will increase the power of the English state. Although aligned with English mercantilist thought, Defoe’s Caledonia also contains a novel difference that still benefits England: The target of the show of force that Defoe encourages is initially not commercial rivals or resource-rich colonies but Scotland itself.

After a brief overview of the poem, I discuss Defoe’s mercantilist methodology as he catalogues Scotland’s resources in the poem’s analysis of the country’s poverty. I then explore how Defoe’s proposed solutions for improvement both display mercantilist “show of force” ideology and ultimately benefit England’s economic position. Reference to the Union, although not overt, is still present in the poem because the economic promises of the treaty are necessary for Defoe’s proposals to succeed. How and why this is the case are discussed along with concluding thoughts in the essay’s final section.

“She’s poor compared to rich and rich compared to poor”: Scotland’s Underdevelopment and Defoe’s Solution

The printed work contains two prefaces addressed to the landed gentry of Scotland. The first is addressed to the Commissioner for Union, the Duke of Queensbury, and the second to the entire Scottish Parliament. In both Defoe says his goal is to praise the good elements of the country. He is more specific in the preface to the Scottish parliament, noting that “The principal design was the climate, nation, seas, trade, lands, improvements, and temper of Scotland and its people.” The point of this inventory, he claims, is not to say how Scotland could be rich but to question rather “Why is she not rich, plentiful, and fruitful?” (np). It is up to the landed men to change the situation. The purpose of the poem, he says, is thus not simply to extol the virtues of Scotland and its people but to present his plan for how it can be improved. He protests at least three times that the poem is not about the Union, concluding that “the Union is noways concern’d in this discourse” (np). However, he declares early in the poem that the wealth of the nation will remain concealed until that “blest hour” when the Union is signed (3). The rest of the preface further exhorts the landed gentlemen, who are also those who will vote on the Act of Union, to undertake the improvement of their lands, as will be discussed below.

Part I of the poem acknowledges the limitations the harsh climate and coastline of the country present for agricultural production, but counterbalances this with a catalogue of Scotland’s bountiful natural resources. Part II discusses the excellent character of the labor force, whose poverty he argues is not their own fault but due to the lack of improvement, and Part III regards the virtues of the landed gentry and the martial valor of the people. Scotland therefore is abundant with natural resources, hard working people, and valiant and learned leaders, and thus no reason in terms of resources to be poor. He concludes by exhorting the country to throw off its poverty by taking advantage of its resources, which can best be done within the framework of the Union. His solution is improved application of labor to land and the development of the fishery, but first he must diagnose the cause of the country’s poverty.

Defoe’s inventorying impulse in this and other works has been noted. Deidre Lynch ascribes it to the burgeoning of consumer culture (84-85). In terms of natural resources, Backscheider sees it as a form of topographical poetry (39). Katherine Penovich attributes it to the Baconian influence of the time. Vickers concurs and credits Defoe’s enthusiasm to “open the Book of Nature” to the education he received at Charles Morton’s academy for Dissenters (32-54, wh73-74). However, Defoe’s inventory of Scotland’s resources throughout the poem is also typical of mercantilist discourse. Chaplin’s observation that seventeenth and eighteenth century projectors saw nature “as a storehouse of information about and supplies for agriculture” applies very well to the mercantilist outlook (134). Mercantilists viewed the world as a warehouse of resources, which were either hidden by God so that men could uncover them and engage in trade or simply existed for extraction and use of the powerful.

An important connection to mercantilist thought arises here. John Morton received training from several members of the Royal Society, one of whose prominent members was William Petty, the creator of political arithmetic. The purpose of political arithmetic was to quantify and categorize the stock of a country’s resources for the use of government administrators to make better decisions on how best to extract and allocate those resources for maximum production and export. Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) and Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672) are early examples of the practice of categorizing human, animal, and material resources as means to the end of mercantilist imperialist expansion. Political arithmetic was created to identify and quantify Ireland’s resources in order to shift their use from underproductive to more productive sectors. The endpoint of Petty’s practice was to make policy suggestions that would not only shift resources from less productive to more productive uses in Ireland, but also shift Irish resources to sectors that would not compete with English production (Several Essays in Political Arithmetic, 228-233).

The methodology of political arithmetic can best be seen in Political Anatomy of Ireland. The chapter headings and subheadings demonstrate that not only the physical but also the social resources of the country are considered to be inputs available for use. Petty begins with a survey “of the lands in Ireland,” the people and their houses and labor, the church, and then the rebellion of 1641. Next he analyzes the “militia and defence of Ireland” and the state of trade in the country, and then presents suggestions for improvement. “A Catalogue of the Peers” appears in chapter XVI, where he also includes subsections on the lords, knights, and burgesses. In chapter V, Petty mentions the rebellions of the Irish, but asserts that they will not rebel again, and also discusses the inconveniences of a lack of full union with Ireland. In Caledonia Defoe performs a similar cataloguing exercise to Petty but in a more creative mode. The sequence Defoe follows in the poem is the same: a survey of physical resources, the human resources, and a note that the church and country have escaped the rebelliousness of other nations, such as Ireland. Special praise is reserved for Scotland’s lack of rebelliousness, which, he argues, has made resources in Scotland more reliably available for productive use. Although he does not then argue explicitly about the inconveniences of a lack of union as in Petty, the implication is apparent, given Defoe’s prescriptions regarding economic improvement, and would have been clear to contemporary readers familiar with Petty’s text.

Through the inventory Defoe demonstrates that, except for the cold climate and large tracts of infertile soil, Scotland’s poverty cannot be due to natural causes (15). Rather, the country is poor due to a lack of production and consumption. In terms of economic development, a cold climate and nutrient-poor soil are no small things and negatively affect a country’s production possibilities in the agricultural sector. However, rather than discussing this real economic challenge, Defoe instead focuses on resources that are present but underutilized. He allows that one cause of the country’s low production is the hunger of the labor force. However, he argues, the issue of hunger could be easily solved through the use of the country’s key natural resource, which is its overlooked abundance of fish. Scotland’s true bounty lies in its deep bays and harbors, an extensive and dangerous coast that keeps invaders away, “the convenience of her harbors, safe roads, and neighborhood both to the German and Atlantick oceans” (6), long days of sunlight, science and art in sailing, and the “treasure of the fishery” (12). Thus he encourages Scotland to develop its fishery industry and to present its results “to every hungry Door” (15). He believes this treasure is “unexhausted” and enough to “subsist the whole Nation” (16, note F). Proper development of the fishing industry will not only make the country prosperous and thus the envy of those abroad, but also the “dread” of those in other seas (16). As such, it is Scotland’s commercial power and efficiency in this industry, rather than any show of military might, that will display its power to other countries.

He continues, “This, and your Valour, would restore your fame; How would your Navies quickly spread the Seas, and guard that wealth they help you to possess?” (18). So far this is not necessarily innovative thought, as it is standard mercantilist practice to identify a key resource for production and specialize in the production of it for overseas export. Defoe concedes that Scotland will need time before it can take advantage of overseas trade in fish, recommending the use of the fish for home consumption first to alleviate hunger. Advocacy of home consumption is unusual for mercantilist thinkers when dealing with colonies and provinces, so it seems that Defoe is moving towards improved quality of life arguments that one finds later in Scottish Enlightenment discourse. However, it is likely that Defoe is willing to counter the traditional export promotion argument because Scotland will soon be, he hopes, one political unit with England, once the Act of Union is passed and ratified. Following the projected chronology of the poem, its implication is that once Scotland is more fully developed and part of the Union, only then will it be able to engage in export promotion and the development of its navy, or utilize the resources of the English navy to protect its overseas trade.⁵

It is important to recognize that in mercantilist thought people are inventoried just as much as natural resources because they are also a resource, as Petty first demonstrated by quantifying different kinds of population and labor in the Down Survey and subsequent works. Mercantilism also places great stress on having a large population so that the available labor force will be larger. Similarly, parts II and III of Caledonia are an inventory of the potential of the labor force, and a directive as to how the country’s leadership can make that labor force more productive. Given that Scotland has an abundance of natural resources, Defoe seeks in the next portions of the poem to explore why there is little to no manufacturing in the country. The second part of the poem thus analyzes both the people and their practices.

Defoe praises the hardiness and virtue of the industrious poor who obey both their landlords and their religion, and do not entertain the same rebellious notions, he claims, as those in other countries (24-26). He reserves his criticism for those whom he calls the “little chiefs,” or smaller landholders who charge the highest rent they can to their tenants, before those tenants know how much they will harvest or what it will be worth, thus creating a disincentive for the farmers to be more productive (23, notes A and C). The actions of the landlords are counterproductive for both the workers and the landlords themselves because they prevent the improvement of the land of the “little chief,” resulting in lower incomes for both parties. The productivity of the labor force is thus another form of wealth to be “uncovered” if the landlords can be enjoined to enclose their lands and undertake improvements, without initially raising their rents before their tenant farmers can make enough to pay it. Rack-renting the tenants suppresses productivity in the agricultural sectors because it creates a disincentive for farmers to be more productive, in fear their rents will be further raised in proportion to the value of what they can produce. Any surplus made by the farmer must be either given in rent or sold to raise cash for rent. With this erasure of incentives there is little chance for real economic improvement either in the life of the tenants, or, more importantly to Defoe as a mercantilist, in the economic output of the country.

The next portion of the poem seems to be merely an extended paean to the valor of Scottish soldiers who have fought abroad. However, considering its location just after the discussion of the hardworking and virtuous agricultural labor force, the discussion of those in military service is simply an extension of the inventory of the productive powers of the population. Defoe’s point in cataloguing the military activities of the nation on behalf of others is to make two points. The first is to say that this valor is in vain: “But valiant Scots, what business had you here?” he remarks on those who fought in battles for Sweden and others (33). His second major point is that the military skill of the people and resources used by those who hired themselves out to fight for others should be spent only in the defense of their own country and interests. “You had no desperate fortunes there to raise,” he asserts, and thus no real reason to be training others’ soldiers and fighting others’ wars (37).

From a mercantilist standpoint the martial valor of Scottish soldiers abroad is in vain because it neither benefits them economically nor increases the military power of Scotland. Defoe does not deny the glory of the Scots’ past military exploits, but shows that these have been either in the past or on behalf of others. In mercantilist terms if one is using one’s military force to actively secure and defend overseas trade and territories, then it is being used effectively. Otherwise, it represents a misallocation or underutilization of resources. Defoe expresses just this sentiment in the line “Scotland has sons indeed, but none to spare” (37). Population growth rather than emigration is vital from a mercantilist perspective in that the larger the population, the greater the potential labor force of varying skills. Defoe presents the cost of foregone alternatives of continuing on the current path: lost population, lost production, lost hands to contribute to improvement, and thus lost prosperity.

He theorizes that Scotsmen have left to fight for others due to a lack of well-paid employment, or any employment at all, which can be inferred when he presents his solutions. Essentially, Defoe believes that Scotland is in what modern development economics calls a poverty trap, where the conditions that created poverty in the first place will reinforce and make that poverty worse, thus ensuring the people remain in poverty or leave the country, since in mercantilist thought and Defoe’s logic, poverty encourages sloth (Review 46). Scotsmen work as soldiers abroad because to do so is preferable to low wages, but then are not available to work domestically, thus reinforcing a situation of underproduction that causes further unemployment and lack of available jobs. The soldiers will return to work in Scotland only once there is more production and hence more paid employment available. Having demonstrated that the country’s lack of production is due neither to a lack of physical resources nor any lack of will in the labor force, he turns to the sector of society who have the material and political power to undertake an improved mobilization of resources. Hence the next section of the poem assesses his subscribers, the landed gentry.

Part III begins with a recognition of the honor of the landed gentry of Scotland and the benefit they enjoy of freedom from the corruption of the court politics in England. He also takes stock of other characteristics the gentry possess that are useful for a mobilization of production, or as it is referred to in economics, human capital. He praises the “commonwealth of learning” (52), knowledge of sciences and the arts, honesty, and friendship of the people of the great houses (54), many of whom of course also take part in the Union debates and all of whom have a vote. They also make up the majority of his subscribers who are also addressed in the preface. It is this group to whom the whole poem is directed, as he says in the preface that:

the reason of this discourse is to examine who are the objects of this improvement, who the persons must do it… And this, my lords and gentlemen, must be your part; you alone can put your hands to the healing the wounds, time, negligence, unhappy constitutions, civil dissensions, and all the state broils of the nation have put upon your prosperity (np).

Defoe’s inventory of the virtues of the gentry demonstrates that there is no lack of strong qualities in the leadership of the country, and therefore it is up to these to lead the country in economic rather than political advancement. In the preface he encourages them to undertake the improvement that smaller landholders will not and proposes that this is a natural service, akin to military service but one performed on the resources of the land. Therefore there is no loss of service and duty in turning the country’s leaders towards the country’s material improvement and away from military exploits, while also gaining a personal benefit of more profit from their improved lands.

What then are the ultimate causes of Scotland’s poverty? Defoe explains in Part III that sloth is the cause of Scotland’s poverty “but not your major crime” (57). Sloth and poverty are both the cause and effect of each other, as “poverty makes sloth and sloth makes poor” (58). Scotland is thus in a poverty trap where the low level of economic development creates inaction because there is no incentive to industry, which then further exacerbates a lack of production. The low levels of production he attributes simply to “time,” indicating that the economic decline has been part of a gradual but long process of neglect (58).⁶ How is the labor force to be more productive and bring the soldiers home to bolster industry? “Success alone can quicken industry,” he says. Thus the productivity of the country will have to be jumpstarted by some force outside of the labor force itself in order to generate the initial successes that will cause labor to have incentives to be more productive (59). He concludes that there is “No barrenness but in your industry” (57) and it is up to the landed gentry to initiate the process of economic development through the physical improvement of the land, changing the practices of the “little chiefs” in rack-renting their tenants, and developing the fishing and shipping industries, and of course in voting for the Union.

Outside In: The Use and Transference of Force

Regardless of its actual financial situation, from a mercantilist perspective early eighteenth-century Scotland was poor. Its external trade was largely conducted with Scandinavian countries and was not outwardly focused on building a commercial empire. With the failure of the Darien colony in Panama in 1700, the country not only lost over a quarter of its wealth, but also lost a key mark of mercantilist power, a colony. The subscribers to the Darien colonization scheme, who came from every segment of society, lost substantial portions of their fortunes. Continued economic recession due to the loss of the French trade, as well as ventures by Scottish merchants in England trading to the Americas, resulted in an exodus of people in search of employment (MacInnes, 160, fn 53; Armitage 97-118; Whately 139-183). Lacking an overseas commercial presence and a domestic navy to further such a presence, the country would not have the means, from a mercantilist perspective, to become powerful unless it were to change its focus to the maximization of production for external trade. Defoe’s plan of improvement, utilizing mercantilist thought, provides the means for Scotland to start on a mercantilist growth path centered on the fishing trade. Wealth from the fishery and the expectant increased labor force from the return of soldiers overseas would cause the country to be rich and happy. He exhorts the country to be strong and great, but also, tellingly, “be Europe’s greatest fear” (18). While he is not adamant about a positive balance of trade, instead emphasizing increased production of fish for inland trade in general, Defoe still maintains the mercantilist rhetoric of command of resources and control of the seas and expansion overseas.

Mercantilism promotes the exertion of military strength as a means of both conducting and securing overseas trade. Thus it is not enough for Defoe that the Scots could develop the fishery trade only for their own subsistence; the nation must eventually also develop a navy (or join forces with a post-Union British navy) and “defeat the seas,” besting any trade competitors who may try to take Scotland’s bounty or compete with them in the export of fish. As Aravamudan argues, due to the development of the English navy in the seventeenth century the ocean “becomes a proxy for British power…” (48). In Defoe’s case this extends to control of the resources of the ocean, and the ability to both ship those resources elsewhere and defend them.

The martial goals of mercantilism, in terms of military benefits for England, are present in his plan for Scotland’s economic improvement. In his Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union with Scotland (1706), written to persuade the English, Defoe stresses that a major advantage of the Union is that the Scottish soldiers who now fight for several different countries will return home either to engage in manufactures and agriculture or to increase the armed forces of Great Britain. He says plainly of this potentially surplus population that “This is a Treasure beyond the Indies, and what few people know how to value…” (28, emphasis in text). The martial advantage of power over others transfers to England if the returned soldiers join the future British navy, and regardless of whether they fight for Britain or simply return to engage in agriculture and fishing in Scotland, the longstanding military threat to England from Scotland would decrease. Meanwhile, in Scotland military power is turned into power over oneself, as the nation is to direct its physical force inwardly to the deployment of hands on the land in agriculture and manufacturing.

The show of aggressive and even deadly force to demonstrate national power that is key to mercantilism is not eliminated in Caledonia, but merely transferred. To a mercantilist, national power is shown in any action that increases, protects, or displays the wealth of the nation, and this worldview animates Defoe’s analysis. One of the clearest examples of this is in the violent imagery at the end of the poem, which would be even more jarring out of a mercantilist context for one promoting peace between two hostile neighbors. Here the aggressive physical force that could be used for warfare abroad is instead to be transferred to the extraction and transformation of Scotland’s natural resources:

Natures a virgin, very chast and coy,

To court her’s nonsense, if ye will enjoy,

She must be ravish’t,

When she’s forcd she’s free,

A perfect prostitute to industry;

Freely she opens to the industrious hand,

And pays them all the tribute of the land (59, emphasis in text).

While much could be said about the sexual nature of the violence portrayed in the poem, that is beyond the scope of this article. What I wish to underscore is that the imagery of violent seizure—the rhetoric of force—applied to resources is consonant with the mercantilist worldview. Strength of arms is an expression of state power that can manifest itself commercially or militarily but stems from the same ideology. “Treasures,” whether in specie or resources, exist for the seizure and use of those willing to exert force to take them. Defoe indicates that Scotland lacked the will to do so for itself, and so is not as powerful as England. As implied throughout the poem, and following the standard English mercantilist template of resource extraction, the true sources of Scotland’s wealth are represented as hidden and must be brought forth by forceful means. The resources available “if ye will enjoy” must be turned to whatever purpose those in power wish them to be used.

Conclusion: Caledonia as Mercantilist Thought and Political Propaganda

In this article I have sought to show that in a seemingly innocuous poem on the virtues of Scotland and its populace, Defoe deftly engages in a reasoned mercantilist argument to increase Scotland’s production through means that benefit the English economy. The suggested focus on the fishing industry to generate jobs to attract soldiers back to Scotland removes a military threat to England by transforming potential soldiers into laborers. In a time when the Protestant succession in Scotland after Queen Anne is in question, and indeed considering that many Scottish people had never fully accepted the Glorious Revolution, the discouragement of any northern martial activity could only be a benefit to those who feared future hostility from Scotland and any attempt at a Stuart restoration.⁷ This is a legitimate fear as the first attempt, albeit unsuccessful, at a Jacobite rising occurs in 1708, shortly after the Act of Union is implemented (MacInnes 316; Whately 346-347).

Suggesting that the Scottish people turn their full attention to the fishing industry requires that they reduce the labor and resources applied to other trades in which they compete with the English, such as the linen, wool, and cattle trades. Although Defoe promotes enclosure and improvement of output on the lands of the landed gentry, the emphasis in his plan is on the production of goods mostly for domestic rather than external trade, again eliminating any potential threat a truly improved Scottish economy might have for competing with English exports. A strong external Scottish fishing trade would not hurt English commercial interests abroad, and would be a boon for the national trade balance if the Union would take place.

Defoe not only offers policy advice that benefits English trade, but also encourages Scottish production in directions that coincide with provisions made in the Treaty of Union. Hence the poem is both economic policy advice and a thinly veiled attempt to shape the ministers’ vote on the treaty. The poem’s promotion of the fishing industry can be read as an argument for the Union. One of the promises made in the treaty negotiations by the English ministers to their Scottish counterparts was to promote “Manufactories and Companies for carrying on the Fishery,” according to the eyewitness account of Scottish Parliamentarian George Lockhart of Carnwath (1714). He continues, “The Communication of Trade was magnified to the Skies, and the East and West India Gold was all to terminate in Scotland…” (212).⁸ The promise of direct investment from England for infrastructure for trade and shipping, and direct subsidies for the fisheries, were necessary and attractive due to both the underdevelopment of the Scottish economy and the ongoing disruption of Scottish trade due to the union of the crowns, the Navigation Act (1660) and the Act for the Encouragement of Trade (1673), which barred the Scottish from trade in the Plantations, and by more recent English policy. For instance, the Alien Act of 1705 barred the entry of Scottish goods into England unless Scotland entered negotiations for the Union. The Union however promised to allow Scotland to make use of English trade monopolies abroad and to reopen trade between England and Scotland (Smout, “Anglo-Scottish Union” 462-464).

Despite the claims in the preface that the poem is not about the Union, Defoe nonetheless refers to that “blessed hour” when Scotland’s poverty will end and Scotland’s concealed wealth will come forth when the Union is joined (3, note). How the Union will do this is not specified in the poem itself but underlies the economic arguments directed at the gentry. Although the improvement of the fishing industry is certainly a positive step, the poem does not discuss how such improvement will be funded. The development of ports, bridges, harbors, and the shipping industry that Defoe promotes would have to be financed through private investment or increases in taxation. Scotland at the time of the Union debates had little surplus domestic funding at the household or administrative level. After the failure of the Darien Company and the resultant recession it caused, many of the landed gentry were in debt as were many merchants and manufacturers who had invested in the scheme. However, Article XV of the Union treaty included a direct payment, called The Equivalent, to be made from the English government to all of the subscribers of the Darien Company. The Equivalent is considered by both contemporary witnesses, such as both pro-Unionist John Clerk and anti-Unionist George Lockhart, and modern historians to be the major force that brought about the Union’s eventual passage (Clerk 151-153; Lockhart 156-157; Whately, Bought and Sold). The improvement Defoe suggests could be realized in the short run with the funding the treaty offered, free of interest, that would be made available by voting in favor of the Union.⁹ While the poem presents a solution to Scotland’s economic misfortunes, it also presents a very hard bargain.

Becoming a “perfect prostitute to industry” in the ways that Defoe suggested thus strongly benefited the English economy, but was not necessarily the best step for Scottish economic development and its economic and political sovereignty.¹⁰ It was, however, the most expedient. The rhetoric Defoe uses in the promotion of the forceful use of Scotland’s resources demonstrates both his mercantilist principles and his pro-Unionist goals. Through trade policy and the Equivalent, both of which are implicit in the “advice” given in the poem, the English attempted to force Scotland into Union. Novak states that Defoe attempts to be “deliberately witty and outrageous” with his wording regarding the ravishing of Scotland (Daniel Defoe 308). Whether that is true or not, the rhetoric within Defoe’s statements, as well as the analysis, inventory, and solutions within Caledonia, is deliberately mercantilist, built upon the conception of the use of force to promote one’s political and economic aims. As he makes clear in a pamphlet directed to his English audience, “In this Union here are Lands and People added to the English Empire” (5, emphasis in text). The language of mutual benefit is absent, demonstrating the mercantilist view that wealth is fixed and so in any transaction there can be only one winner. Just as Defoe is something more sophisticated than what he presented himself to be to the Scottish ministers, Caledonia is more than a friendly reflection on Scotland and its improvement. Throughout the work Defoe maintains his position as Harley’s agent and displays a keen mercantilist outlook in his analysis and recommendations that encourage the use of Scotland’s resources and reduced economic position to accomplish the goals of the English state.

University of Dallas

The author wishes to thank the editors and two anonymous referees, all of whose reflections and suggestions resulted in a much-improved final product. The research for this paper was partially funded by the King Haggar Scholars Award from the University of Dallas.

“Visualizing Crusoe” is a DH project that examines the centrality of visualization in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The project aims to capture two dual threads that emerge from the novel and an examination of Defoe’s text in the digital age: the first, “visualizing Crusoe”—that is, using DH tools to visualize, model, and reveal aspects of the novel proper; and the second, “visualizing Crusoe”—a fitting description of a protagonist who makes meaning of his world by producing visual tools and artifacts, including lists, tables, journals, and tallies during his time spent upon the island. Three-hundred years ago—centuries before the digital humanities boom—Crusoe thinks visually. Visualizing Crusoe curates these examples of data visualization in the novel and also features new visualizations based on the text, including an interactive timeline of events in the novel and a map of Crusoe’s travels, to reveal how many of our current methods of data visualization are indebted to older, traditional forms of data visualization and how our current digital moment can provide new insights into Defoe’s canonical text.

IN 1154, MUHAMMAD al-Idrisi drew one of the most detailed medieval world maps, the Tabula Rogeriana, for King Roger II of Sicily (Fig. 1). The map reflects the ancient geographical theory that Africa’s eastern and western rivers share a source. This image of Africa had a longstanding effect on how Europeans conceptualized the continent’s interior, one that lasted well into the eighteenth century. As late as the 1730s and 40s, travelers were still searching for conclusive evidence on whether the Niger, the Gambia, and the Senegal were three different rivers or one and whether they converged with the Nile in the hinterland. In Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738), for instance, he points out that both Herodotus and al-Idrisi suggest that “a Branch of the Nile runs westward, and after a very long Course falls into the Atlantick Ocean…by the Gambia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, being augmented in its Passage by all the Waters which fall to the South of Mount Atlas” (28). Moore proposes, as further evidence for this, the fact that hippopotamuses and crocodiles inhabit both the Nile and the Gambia and that the two rivers exhibit similar flooding patterns (28-29).ⁱ

Not simply an abstract geographical quandary, the question of whether Africa’s western and eastern waterways connected shaped Europe’s economic and imperial engagement with the continent. In his introduction to John Newbery’s World Displayed (1759), Samuel Johnson writes that the Portuguese were told by an ambassador from Benin that a Christian country lay to the east (Abyssinia) and that “by passing up the river Senegal [the Christian king’s] dominions would be found” (xxvi). It is only after attempts to find this overland route failed that the Portuguese began sailing to Ethiopia around the Cape of Good Hope (xxviii). Similarly, British explorers like George Thompson (1618) and Richard Jobson (1620) sailed up the Gambia in the hopes that, rather than crossing the Sahara as Arabic traders did, they would be able to tap into “the golden trade, by the South-parts” (Jobson 4-5). These fantasies of access went hand-in-glove with descriptions of Africa as a land packed with untold wealth found in geographies such as Leo Africanus’s History and Description of Africa (trans. 1600), which described Sahel cities rich and cosmopolitan, or Olfert Dapper’s Description of Africa (trans. 1670), which included an image of West Africans casually scooping gold out of a stream.ⁱⁱ The discovery of a hydraulic network that spanned the continent would enable access to Africa’s interior ivory fields and gold mines, the location of which African potentates kept secret well into the nineteenth century, and it would allow Europeans to sidestep indigenous brokers.ⁱⁱⁱ Goods might also then be transported between Europe and the East Indies without needing to be shipped around the Cape or through Ottoman waters.^iv

Early maps of Africa echoed these fantasies. “Geographers, in Afric maps” may have “o’er unhabitable downs/ Place[d] elephants for want of towns” (180-82), as Jonathan Swift once quipped, but far more frequently, they placed major waterways where there are none. Maps by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1635), John Senex (1721), and Herman Moll (c. 1715) all show the major western rivers and the Nile within centimeters of one another, flirting if not outright connecting, and all three add the Congo River into the mix, indicating that it, too, might be a tributary of the Nile that extends all the way through the southwest quadrant of the continent (Figs. 2-4). ^v Their cartouches and the decorative details make promises about what one would find if one followed these rivers. Senex’s cartouche shows an African figure bent over and gathering armloads of elephant tusks scattered on the ground. Elephants and rivers are inextricably coupled in the center of Blaeu’s map and occupy more of the interior than do human settlements. The geographical story that such maps tell far exceeded the empirical data available to Europeans at the time.

Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720) enters this discourse about Africa’s rivers in ways that test the limits of early Enlightenment mapping practices. David Livingstone argues that a map’s “cultural power” (154) comes from the way it is distanced from the place it represents: such “uncoupling of text and context gives the impression that the map discloses universal truth” (158). Captain Singleton closes this distance again. Text and context are rejoined as the eponymous protagonist and a troop of Portuguese mutineers use a contemporary map of Africa to navigate from Madagascar to the European forts on the Gold Coast. The resulting narrative increasingly mirrors the story that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps told about Africa.^vi Following a serendipitously placed network of rivers through the center, Singleton and the crew reach the west coast so wealthy from the gold and ivory littering the interior that critics have read the text as unrepentant propaganda for the Royal African Company.^vii However, as Singleton moves further away from the well-documented coasts into the largely unknown center, his geographical descriptions also become increasingly incredulous, haunted by contradictory details and zoologically impossible beasts that provoke sensory stupefaction. As the text aligns early Enlightenment mapping conventions with Singleton’s suspect accounting practices, the image of “universal truth” showcased by maps, both inside and outside the text, is splintered.