XVII-XVIII (Dec 2019)
The Ambiguities of Captain Singleton, Defoe’s Piratical Novel
Abstract
Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton has received modest critical attention, perhaps because it appears to modern readers as a relatively unexciting narrative which endorses piratical theft by unconvincing arguments, and because it passes over in silence the dreadful violence for which pirates were famous and abominated. The text is highly problematic. This essay establishes the historical context of the novel within the ambiguous attitude of the British state towards piracy at the time Defoe is writing. The State condoned piracy under the name privateering when it served British mercantilist interests, and condemned piracy when it threatened British colonial trade. A second layer of ambiguity is provided by Defoe’s personal fascination with the accumulation of great wealth by immoral or illicit means. This essay explores how both sets of contradictions are fundamental to mercantilist ideology of rising capitalism: the ideology of honest trade and fair-dealing masked the primitive accumulation of capital by atrocious violence, sometimes official and State-sponsored; sometimes individualistic and ad hoc. The essay also explores how Captain Singleton contributes to the imaginative appropriation of Africa and the Indian and Southern Pacific Oceans, preparing for their hegemonic subjection to the British Empire, and entry into British literature, across the next two hundred years.
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