Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe begins in the maritime world of the seventeenth century, where trade, private ambition, enslavement, and colonial expansion travel the same routes. Against his parents' wishes, Crusoe leaves England for the sea in 1651. Storms and capture do not extinguish his desire to voyage, and his pursuit of opportunity eventually places him on an expedition connected to the Atlantic slave trade. A shipwreck then isolates him on an island near the Venezuelan coast.

Daniel Defoe turns that isolation into an exacting record of labor. Crusoe salvages tools and supplies, builds shelter, marks time, grows food, raises animals, and reads the Bible. His practical ingenuity gives the narrative its durable adventure structure, while the historical context complicates any simple celebration of self-reliance. The habits of ownership, conversion, and hierarchy that he carries from the wider colonial world do not disappear when society falls away.

The island is therefore both a survival ground and a concentrated version of its period. Material problems invite close attention, but encounters with other people raise questions about who has the power to name, teach, command, or judge.