3 - Defoe, commerce, and empire

Summary

“A True-Bred Merchant is a Universal Scholar; his Learning Excells the meer Scholar in Greek and Latin as much as that does the Illiterate Person, that cannot Write or Read: He Understands Language, without Books, Geography without Maps, his Journals and Trading-Voyages delineate the World, his Foreign Exchanges, Protests and Procurations, speak all Tongues; he sits in his Counting-House, and Converses with all Nations, and keeps up the most exquisite and extensive part of human Society in a Universal Correspondence.” Daniel Defoe, the Review / As the eighteenth-century geographer Herman Moll asserted, “no one Man can possibly view the whole Earth in a Life-Time.” Reading Defoe's extensive writings, one might be excused for thinking that Moll underestimated the singular imaginative powers of one of his acquaintances who wrote as if he had first-hand knowledge of the entire globe. While Defoe was not a genuine globetrotter, he had an expansive global perspective on trade. He was a spokesperson for the new world order of the English Enlightenment - its scientific, political, and financial revolutions - and his commercial curiosity and colonial projections involved domains as far-flung as China, the South Seas, and the Americas. Defoe's extensive writings covered the viability of commerce and colonization in all four major continental landmasses, and the still uncharted “South Seas,” or Pacific Ocean. Defoe thought about the commercial world as one complex interactive entity, and he wrote many thousands of words about it. Defoe began to explore adventure themes very late in his career (the first volume of Robinson Crusoe appeared when he was fifty-nine years old). For Defoe, adventure stories were like thought-experiments. In his hands, the adventure novel is a means of diagnosing global positioning for national domestic advantage. Adventure leads to empire in Defoe's writings. And yet imperial acquisition seems merely incidental to the adventure tale.