Racial and National Identities in Defoe’s Writings

Abstract

Abstract This chapter attends to the fluid and contradictory constructions of racial and national identity in Daniel Defoe’s writings. Defoe’s sense of Englishness is bound up with broader ideas about Britishness and Europeanness, and in his writings traits associated with these groups are often compared to ‘Other’ groups of ‘foreign’ or ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ origins. However, none of Defoe’s opinions about racial or national character appear fixed and often come into conflict within the same work. Works across several genres, including his poem The True-Born Englishman (1700/1) and novel Captain Singleton (1720), demonstrate the conflation of nation and race, the contradictions inherent in descriptions of specific peoples, and the burgeoning justifications for colonialism and imperialism that would form the backbone of English and British identity in the later part of the eighteenth century.