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Nationalism, Commerce, and Imperial Anxiety in Defoe's Later Works

Daniel Defoe's later works — fictional and journalistic — make a case for English imperial control over the Americas in the early 18th century. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and the lesser known but more polemically explicit Atlas Marìtìmus & Commercialis, show much of the world as promising for English commerce but anxiously fix on the Americas as necessary to the economic health of the nation. These works were aimed at various audiences; the novels sought to influence merchants, while the Atlas, a massive and expensive book, was geared towards the ruling class. Defoe is anxious to make it clear that Providence seems to have decreed that "all North-America would be English." Much of Defoe's body of work can be seen as a heterogeneous speech act that sought to do what Edward Said's Orientalism claims the French and British in the next century would do concerning the East: represent the Other in terms that rendered it familiar yet inferior, and as such colonizable and possessable. Print culture leads directly to imperial and economic expansion.