Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Robinson Crusoe on the British Isles

Daniel Defoe was perhaps the first theoretician of the new system of imperial economy. A prolific writer and skilful spy, Defoe is remembered for his Robinson Crusoe , but he also wrote hundreds of analytical briefs for both the Whigs and the Tories. In one of his early texts, An Essay upon Projects (1697), Defoe compared fashionable world-shaking schemes – the new specialty of the educated elite – to the Tower of Babel, ‘too big to be manag’d, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing’. 1 Many such projects were connected to the new colonies. Some worked, others failed, and the only proof of the pudding was in the eating.

Together with his Scots friend William Paterson, Defoe worked on creating the Bank of England; a little less ambitious than the Tower of Babel, this project met with success. Incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1694, the new bank would finance the crown’s war efforts by selling its own shares at 8 per cent annual interest. It would cover this debt from taxes on the tonnage of ships, and also from duty on wine and beer. In this balanced way, the Bank of England brought the colonial and domestic influx of revenue to one place. In a pamphlet concerning standing armies (1698), Defoe wrote that wealth would win wars, while the idea of military valour was archaic, ‘Gothic’. A truly modern thinker, Defoe despised the Gothic past – the realm of brute force, subsistence farming and chivalric romances. What the country needed was a standing army that would be supported by Parliament and financed by regular taxes and tariffs.

A worldwide best-seller, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a refutation of Don Quixote , written a hundred years earlier. A seafarer, sugar planter and slave trader, Robinson embodied the image of early capitalism just as Don Quixote symbolised the vanished Middle Ages. After crossing two oceans, Robinson returns to England overland, through China and Russia, with a consignment of Russian fur – a strangely archaic product of his adventures. But in his work of 1728, A Plan of the English Commerce , Defoe called for the factory processing of English wool to supply Europe and the colonies with ready-made products. A nonconformist, Defoe admired Holland and despised Spain. An enthusiast of industry, he was a consistent mercantilist. In 1706, Defoe set off for Scotland to secure its merger with England; his partner was again William Paterson, the Scottish trader who had made a fortune in the West Indies. Defoe was then working for Robert Harley, who prepared the Union with Scotland Act (1706) and concluded the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). State finances were a perennial headache for this restless statesman. In 1711 he created the South Sea Company, whose task was to convert state debt into shares and secure them by future colonies. A royal charter granted this company a monopoly on trade with South America. By buying shares in the new company, Englishmen were investing in anticipated revenue from the silver mines, sugar plantations and fishing grounds which still belonged to the Spanish enemy. The alchemy of stock markets would solve the problems of financing wars much more effectively than a tax inspector.

Under the Peace Treaty of Utrecht, Spain was forced to open its American ports to British trade. There was no demand for English wool products in the tropics, but the South Sea Company delivered many thousands of African slaves to the Spanish plantations in exchange for silver and sugar. In this way, the company exchanged services for raw materials – a mission worthy of the empire. In 1718 a new war began, and Spain confiscated many English assets in the Southern Atlantic. The shares of the South Sea Company reached a peak in 1720 (in one year they rose tenfold) and then collapsed. Defoe also lost his fortune and spent time in a debtor’s prison. His most successful projects were his novels. Moll Flanders was full of scenes of vice and retribution. Moll crosses the Atlantic, going back and forth between tobacco plantations in the colonies and sex work in the mother country. Repenting of incest, bigamy and other sins, Moll thanks the hand of Providence: sentenced to hard labour, she flees to America, where she buys a plantation. Apparently, a benevolent Providence was a speciality of the colonies.