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The African Artisan Meets the English Sailor:...
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The African Artisan Meets the English Sailor: Technology and the Savage for Defoe

Abstract

Daniel Defoe was preoccupied with industry, skilled work, and technological sophistication as markers of English civilization. But in Captain Singleton (1720), encounters with African workers reveal the porousness of the boundaries between savage and civilized for Defoe; the Africans Singleton enslaves in Mozambique prove to be dextrous and ingenious craftsmen. At the same time, with Singleton's discovery of a naked Englishman in the heart of Africa, Defoe reveals his consciousness of the possibility of cultural degeneracy for Britain: knowledge of the arts and sciences and the practices of industry can be, even within a generation, forgotten and abandoned.

Authors

Walmsley P

Journal

The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 347–368

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press

Publication Date

September 1, 2018

DOI

10.1353/ecy.2018.0019

ISSN

0193-5380

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