Laundering Treasure in Stevenson'sTreasure Island

Abstract

In R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, the motif of the treasure hunt resonates strongly with the economic realities of eighteenth-century Britain, particularly when viewed within the context of the British joint venture boom. This boom erupted in its most hysterical form in the ‘South Sea Company Craze’ of 1720. In Stevenson's fiction, overseas joint ventures and high seas piracy share certain implicit commonalities, though one of these is never mentioned – or, more accurately, it is repressed. In Pierre Macherey's terms, this repressed element constitutes a non-dit of the fiction, something without which the text could not have been written, yet whose manifest presence would also have made the text impossible. At the centre of this constituting-yet-absent history, a shady commodity lurks: the trade in human merchandise, whose sales fill the English coffers with Spanish silver and gold. Attempting to articulate what Stevenson's pirate story could not say, this article probes its displaced politico-economic history, concluding that the novel's exotic treasure hunt serves as an ideological alibi for the profit-laundering of its trade in human slaves.