Disposable World(s): Race and Commerce in Defoe's Captain Singleton

Abstract

Abstract: In this essay, I examine Daniel Defoe's less well-known castaway novel, Captain Singleton (1720), in order to show how his fiction at once dramatizes and interrogates the view of colonial commerce he champions in his economic writings. I begin with the claim that Defoe presents a view of economic plenitude premised on the universal disposability of the world's resources—including persons, places, and things. According to this perspective, an object's utility derives from its capacity to be repositioned or repurposed in a new or different context. Captain Singleton translates this theory into fictional form, but in doing so it also reveals features of Defoe's thinking that were obscured in his economic writings. By juxtaposing acts of collective ingenuity and resourcefulness with acts of racialized enslavement, the novel suggests that each could be understood as operations of a commercial system that disregarded the meaning or integrity of individual lives and local sets of relations. I argue, finally, that the novel introduces a system of racialized enslavement whose function is to establish the relative worth of white humans—and their resistance to commercial disposability.