Crusoe’s Absence: Sugar Economies and the Ingenuity of Realism

If, as postcolonial criticism has shown, Crusoe's experience is part of the longue durée of race and empire in the West, it must be considered in relation to earlier Iberian as well as subsequent Dutch, French, and English imperial projects. In this light, Crusoe’s absence from his Brazilian plantation is as significant as his presence on the island, and reinserts his narrative into broader contexts of inter-imperial rivalry, Atlantic sugar, and a more nuanced history of the novel. Reading Robinson Crusoe in relation to the layered and entangled history of colonialism in the Atlantic World reveals the partiality of viewing the protagonist on his island as an English exemplar.