Daniel Defoe on Naturalization

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the connection in Daniel Defoe’s writing between naturalization as a civic concept and naturalization as an epistemological or literary-critical process. For Defoe, the incorporation of new subjects was a moral project that entailed the literary interpellation of a more productive, tolerant and empowered populace. A history of his efforts to encourage immigration by broadening access to legal citizenship provides, then, not just crucial insight into his view of the national political community but points to the role his satire, journalism and novels might play in bringing subjects together in its formation. In pursuit of this history, I trace Defoe’s approach to naturalization to The True-born Englishman (1700), the poem that established his reputation as an advocate for immigration reform. I then track Defoe’s activism in favour of The Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act (7 Anne c. 5) before its passage in March 1709 and after its repeal in 1711 (10 Anne c. 9), as debate turned to the fate of successive alien populations: Huguenot and Palatine refugees and England’s Jews. These debates provide an important new context for Defoe’s final novel, The Fortunate Mistress [Roxana] (1724). Attention to the ways Defoe deployed poetry and prose fiction during them reveals how questions of admission and assimilation underpinned his polemical strategy as a popular author and signalled the importance of his work to the history of modern citizenship.