Crusoe’s Colonialism as Seen Through His Relationships with Animals: A Digital Humanities Text Analysis

Abstract

This article examines Robinson Crusoe’s colonial ideology through Daniel Defoe’s sustained use of animals—particularly dogs, parrots, and goats—as narrative instruments of domination, companionship, and production. Rather than portraying Crusoe as a solitary hunter-gatherer, the novel depicts him as a colonial agent who systematically domesticates the island, transforming it into what may be described as an “Empire of One.” Using a modified mixed-methods approach inspired by the MMATCH framework, this study integrates distant reading techniques—word frequency counts and emotion lexicon analysis—with iterative close readings of key passages. Focusing on the island portion of the novel, the analysis traces how animal-related language evolves alongside Crusoe’s emotional arc and colonial consolidation. Goats emerge as the primary index of expansion and agricultural control, parrots function as mirrors of linguistic authority and selfhood, and dogs serve as stable instruments of labor rather than growth. Quantitative patterns reveal that the midpoint of the corpus marks both the zenith of animal domestication and a peak in emotional intensity, coinciding with Crusoe’s self-identification as sovereign ruler. Close readings contextualize these patterns, demonstrating how animals substitute for indigenous populations within the colonial imaginary while reinforcing eighteenth-century English hierarchies of nature, labor, and value. By combining computational text analysis with traditional literary interpretation, this study shows how Defoe mobilized animal relationships to naturalize colonial mastery and render empire legible to contemporary readers.