Africa and the Levant in Defoe’s Writings

Abstract Daniel Defoe viewed Africa and the Middle East with a mixture of fear and uncertainty: fear of the threat posed to European Christianity by Islam in northern Africa and the Levant, and uncertainty about the unchartered regions of sub-Saharan Africa. But Defoe also wrote about these parts of the world with a sense of opportunity, anticipating prospects of British trade and colonialism. This chapter analyses Defoe’s call for commercial and intellectual investment in Africa, including his demonizations of Ottomans as a justification for military conquest to dispossess Muslims of the coastal regions of North Africa. It then examines Defoe’s writings in support of the commercial monopoly of the Royal African Company amidst debates about how best to conduct the transatlantic slave trade. Finally, it explores Defoe’s representations of the African interior and its peoples in Captain Singleton (1720), showing how Defoe’s polemical arguments on international trade inform his fiction.