The Island and the Self: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Myth of the Self-Made Man in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often celebrated as the first English novel and as a hymn to human resourcefulness and the spirit of adventure. This essay argues that beneath its surface of survival and self-reliance lies a complex and troubling allegory of early capitalist and colonial ideology. Through analysis of Crusoe's obsessive record-keeping and accumulation, his treatment of the island as a personal plantation, the relationship with Friday as a fantasy of natural mastery, and the religious conversion that justifies his dominion, this essay contends that the novel transforms the material practices of empire enslavement, extraction, and dispossession into a narrative of individual virtue and divine providence. Crusoe is not a simple hero but a cultural archetype: the self-made man whose freedom is built on the labor and subjugation of others. The novel's enduring popularity is inseparable from its power to make a brutal economic order feel like common sense.