> Yes, this is interesting. The founding myth of capitalism is found in the story of Robinson Crusoe -- the original self made man who, after spending some years on a desert island reinventing himself from the ground up, returns to society to discover that he is now a rich man because some plantation he owned made a lot of money in his absence. Since his absence consisted in this very materially deprived self-making (we'll leave Friday aside), we're supposed to feel that he now has earned his plantation riches.
Robinson Crusoe was a slave-trader, and he was shipwrecked on an illicit slave-trading venture. It's funny how this has dropped out of the adaptations. I don't think Defoe was making a deliberate point, but it's certainly in the book's really weird political unconsious. Also that Crusoe was himself enslaved by Arabs (IIRC) on his first voyage out of England.
Mike Beggs