Modern writers and critics have analysed Robinson Crusoe as being an allegory of Western colonialism or imperialism. They have also made their studies based upon middle-class, bourgeois and economic perspectives.

James Joyce expresses that Robinson Crusoe is the true symbol of the British conquest, a man who cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knifegrinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday is the symbol of the subjected races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe; the manly independence and the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy, the practical, well-balanced, religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.

Kettle, Arnold in The 18th Century Novel in England. Estudios sobre los géneros literarios, I: Grecia clásica e Inglaterra. Eds. Javier Coy and Javier de Hoz. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1975, states that the rise of the novel is attributed to the settlement of 1688 and Defoe's fiction reflects the tension between the strengths and dangers of the rising bourgeoisie.

Michel-Michot, Paulette in The Myth of Innocence. Revue des Langues Vivantes, 28, 1962, interprets that Two Robinsonades -Lord of the Flies and The Coral Island - are compared and the latter represents the innocent products of British colonialism, symbolised by the Crusoe story -middle class and puritan.

West, Alick in The Mountain in the Sunlight: Studies in Conflict and Unity. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958, says that Defoe takes a Marxist approach to questions of money and human relations in Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe first rejects middle-class position, but then ends up a bourgeois exploiter.

Codman, W.B. in Confinement and Flight: An Essay on English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, 1977 sets up the idea that the Crusoe's story is retold in terms of early 20th century industrial economy to argue for private ownership of land as long as land can be converted to cash so as to guarantee access to resources to modern industry.

Marx, Karl in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Frederick Engels. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1926, describes that Crusoe as "independent modern man" in contrast to dependency of middle ages, who represents various modes of labor and illustrates value as commodities relationship to labor and use.

Passy, Frederic in Robinson et Vendredi ou la naisance du capital. Revue economique de Bordeaux in March, 1893, uses Crusoe and Friday to argue that labor and capital are mutually reenforcing rather than in conflict. Crusoe possesses moral and intellectual capital, which labour (his and Friday's) transform into material capital.

Schmidt, Arnold Anthony in Lost at Sea: Sailors, Slave, adn Literary Polemics. Ph. D. Dissertation: Vaderbilt U, 1994 (Dissertation Abstracts International, Vol. 56-01) states that the commercial sailor was an agent of imperialism and a literary trope whose depiction illustrates the ways literature naturalised imperialism by aestheticinsing it. Robinson Crusoe is classed with the "mercantile mariners" and described as a personification of the empire, trade, and economic advancement.

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