ABSTRACT
Robinson Crusoe’s use of tobacco and bibliomancy is to cure a distemper in light of the history of the transatlantic global tobacco trade. When Crusoe attributes his knowledge of tobacco’s medicinal properties to the practice of “Brazilians,” he associates knowledge of the drug with indigenous peoples. The tobacco Crusoe uses, cultivates, and sells across Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) reflects and responds to attitudes toward what was by the early eighteenth century a major global trade good. While critics have read Crusoe’s tobacco cure as, variously, a key moment in his spiritual development and a turning point in his quest to extract the natural resources from his island, the tobacco cure is another moment when Crusoe engages in what Lydia H. Liu and Peter Hulme have identified as a colonial disavowal of the indigenous peoples, goods, labor, and technologies that Europeans rely on in their economic dominance of the New World. In the novel’s final pages, when Crusoe returns to England and transforms his tobacco holdings into sellable goods, he engages in just such an act. Crusoe’s tobacco cure reveals the colonial fantasies and transatlantic exchanges at the heart of both tobacco and the novel.
