International Trade and Individual Enterprise: Defoe’s Maritime Adventurers

Abstract

By dramatizing the reform of the vagrant subject who has strayed beyond the line, Dampier’s journals in many ways provide the model for early eighteenth-century narratives of criminal adventure and economic endeavour. In Defoe’s novels, the behaviour of the itinerant yet enterprising protagonists, whether pirates, merchant adventurers, prostitutes or thieves, raises the problem of how individual profit can be reconciled with duty to family, God and state. In the cases of Robinson Crusoe and Bob Singleton, such conflicts are concentrated in the way that these troubled heroes operate as free agents in an international arena, abandoning the ties to their homeland that would ensure the return of colonial profits to the metropolitan core. Thus, while Defoe’s narratives look like allegories for both the primitive accumulation in which English economic power originates and the possessive individualism that such power makes possible, they are not really so economically ‘modern’. The extraordinary initiative that their protagonists demonstrate under arduous circumstances must still be harnessed to the state. As a result, the relationship between individual enterprise and state sovereignty constitutes a kind of narrative undercurrent in each of these stories which surfaces in the consciences of the protagonists as they register the emotional and spiritual cost of accumulating wealth at an enormous distance from home. The transformation of Defoe’s characters into repentant subjects of both providence and English government therefore has everything to do with harnessing wealth to power in the mode of early eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism.