Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is nothing less than a nationalist
narrative that extols the burgeoning capitalism of eighteenth-century
England. In this moving tale, a ship-wrecked slave trader, stranded on an
island for twenty-four-years, single-handedly consolidates the arduous
and multi-tasked feat of making bread – from planting the wheat to
producing the finished product – into a one-person job. On a smaller but
no less devastating scale, he also succeeds in replicating the process of
colonization through his master–slave relationship with Friday. The novel
thus popularizes the notion of self-sufficiency through the mechanisms of
capitalism, conquest, and the transmission of hegemony.
