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In Culture and Imperialism , Edward Said argues that not only is the emergence of the novel contemporaneous with the rise of the British empire, but that the novel is formally implicated in the imperial project: the novel’s depiction of space creatively colonises non-European territory, psychically claiming it for the Occident. 1 In support of this suggestive argument he observes that ‘the prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe , and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island.’ 2 Said’s command of eighteenth-century fiction in general is weak and, of course, he is not the first to connect Robinson Crusoe with concerns of empire, 3 but his argument that Defoe’s novel should be seen against a historically enduring history of empire is worth pursuing. That is to say, the critical discussion of the myth of Crusoe should be augmented by discussion of what the Crusoe myth is for. This present discussion of the politics of empire in Robinson Crusoe focuses on the representation of cannibalism in a group of texts published in the 1770s that are modelled on or cognisant of Defoe’s novel: in the first place an anonymous Robinsonade novel, The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman , first published in 1778, which in part reproduces Crusoe’s castaway narrative, and in addition the reports of cannibalism in the accounts of Captain Cook’s voyages in the southern hemisphere in the period. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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